


loud thunder, heavy rain

by limerental



Series: Other Things I'll Never Be verse [2]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Grief/Mourning, Kaer Morons are Country Boys, M/M, Minor Character Death, Minor Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Past Aiden/Lambert (The Witcher)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:56:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 27,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26802529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: Old buddy Lambert crashes at Eskel’s trailer on his granddad's farm after the drug-related death of Lambert's childhood friend, Aiden. Through the week leading up to the funeral, they bond while reflecting on their shared adolescence, and Eskel is pushed into grappling with his own lost potential. Meanwhile, the close proximity re-ignites something long-buried.spinoff sequel toother things I'll never be
Relationships: Eskel/Lambert (The Witcher)
Series: Other Things I'll Never Be verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1954672
Comments: 41
Kudos: 78





	1. nowhere to go but down, down, down

**Author's Note:**

> this is within the same universe as other things i'll never be aka my trans!Geralt au but could presumably be read as a standalone, though the previous fic sets the backdrop and provides context for this one. 
> 
> the long and short of that context being:  
> -geralt and eskel are twins who grew up on a farm and vesemir is their grandfather  
> -lambert is their childhood friend who worked as a farmhand through the summer  
> -eskel got his scars in a drunk driving car accident when he was 16 that wrecked his life and future  
> -geralt came out as a trans woman just under a year before this story takes place  
> -and is in a poly relationship with yen & jaskier
> 
> ALSO for the sake of this fic, lambert resembles show!lambert (mr. paul bullion) and eskel looks like HARDY for self-indulgent reasons
> 
> this sequel is as close to original fiction as I can get without bothering to write original fiction. 
> 
> the chapter titles will be song lyrics from songs off of [this fic playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2zut3nr3zCCnc5UWiAKUJ9?si=CiZFVIzVQy6TvHMcxtRg9A)
> 
>  **overall content warnings** for character death, dealing with loss, grieving/mourning, alcoholism, references to addiction and the prison system, descriptions of a (past) brutal car accident and resulting hospital stays, surgeries, sickness, and lasting mental trauma, referenced domestic child abuse, and probably additional warnings per chapter

Lambert’s silhouette haloed in the glow of the hospital lobby, still and bright and sterile behind him and leaving the little body that folded into itself on the curb featureless in the answering darkness, Eskel’s eyes straining to look at him through the glare. His head rattled with a thousand and one things he should be thinking or saying and settled finally on _fuck_.

Lambert hadn’t heard him pull in or come up the sidewalk, which was how Eskel knew something was well and truly off kilter. His old lifted diesel wasn’t anything approaching subtle in its deep-throated rumbling, and the county hospital off main street was as dead silent as the rest of the podunk town ever was, whether about midnight as it was or high noon.

And Lambert had always been sharper and more paranoid than the rest of them, quick to swing toward a potential threat and hiss, his instincts tensing up his wiry body and rolling the whites of his eyes like he anticipated a fight. Eskel’d never seen him sit so still and so quiet, would have walked right past him into the lobby, overlooked as a stranger, if not for the frizz of red curls that caught the fluorescence of the hospital like a filament.

“Fuck,” said Eskel succinctly. 

Lambert tried to hide his full body flinch of surprise with a bark of laughter that echoed hollow in the hospital parking lot. A familiar laugh, the hallmark of bonfire nights and hay-blown days. Memories of bullshitting and rabble rousing in old hokey bars and knocking themselves off railroad bridges and wrestling each other in and out of ditches and tailgates and escalating gone-to-shit situations.

“The fuck are you doing here?”

“You really know how to make a guy feel all warm and tingly, kid,” said Eskel. “Guess I’m still your emergency contact.”

“Shit,” said Lambert and unfolded his body from the curb. He was still wearing his work clothes, pale grey button down patched with his name on one breast pocket and a few obscure brands of motorbike on the other. Not a lick of grease on him. Regular gentrified salesman now.

Like any good buddy, Eskel politely ignored his full body shivers as he stood and clapped him on the shoulder. 

“You look like shit,” he said and did not say _oh god, Lambert, oh fuck, how are you going to shake this one off? I know you’re going to try. How do I help? What can I do? What can I do?_

“Thanks, asshole,” said Lambert, tail end of the insult gone unsteady, and did not say _nothing, nothing, you can’t do anything and I couldn’t do anything and that’s fucking that. Nothing. Nothing left to do.  
_

“I’m putting you up at my place,” said Eskel, big hand curving around the back of his buddy’s scrawny neck. Could feel all the knobs of the vertebrae in the swell of his rough palm, long ginger curls tickling scarred knuckles. 

“Gonna keep me out back with the dogs?”

“Yeah, got a nice kennel set up and everything. Bowl of water with your name on it.”

“I’ve got all my shots, mister, I promise.”

“We’ll see about that at the vet. Wave bye bye to your nuts.”

“You put me in a cone of shame, and I’ll whack your kneecaps so good.”

“That’s what she said.”

"Fuck off."

The old hat teasing rung hollow, flat, like something rehearsed. Old habits, the cogs of their brains spinning wild and trying to catch on something familiar, anything, anything. How to approach even beginning to talk about something like this? How to lay it out in any way that made sense? Rung true?

They’d never talked with anything approaching sincerity and seriousness, not really, not through the whole sprawl of their decades-long friendship, not even when their crew was all rod-skinny boys crawling over each other through the summers working on the farm and sleeping in a pile like wolves. 

But there were things Eskel knew without words, simmering over some wavelength between them. 

He was smart enough even as a kid to guess at the way Lambert’s daddy was behind closed doors, though the mechanic seemed mild-mannered enough when he stopped by now and again to service their tractors and equipment. He knew the truth of it by the sickly green of old bruises that seemed to always hang around the length of Lambert’s arms, a few times winking an eye socket swollen shut. 

Eskel wasn’t stupid. Even as a little kid, he knew just why his friend’s reflexes tripped wire-thin, why he tensed over the sudden jangle of keys in a lock, why he lashed so quick into pissed off sharpness. He also knew why, when Lambert was fourteen and his daddy ended up shipped off for assaulting a cop, no one lost sleep over it or acted surprised. 

He wasn’t stupid. He knew things Lambert didn’t have to tell him and never would.

Eskel’s thumb stuck in the groove of Lambert’s taut tendons, and he held there and shook him a little, just enough to feel like a show of comfort without leaning into overt affection. Eskel’d always tended toward affectionate, tugging and grappling his buddies into embraces and hanging on. Something he pinned on being a twin, doomed to a lifetime of trying to touch somebody as free and intimate as the womb. 

Show a lick of affection to Lambert, and you risked getting clawed like you’d tried to hug an alleycat, yowling and spitting, live-wire tension licking back across your nerves like you’d rubbed your shoulders against a cattle fence while passing under. 

He sure didn’t expect Lambert to drop his head forward and give to the sway of the touch, feet planted on the edge of the hospital sidewalk and shoulders moving away and then back to bump against Eskel’s bicep. Away and back again. His red hair swung and tumbled over whatever expression twisted his face, too dark to see anyway, the streetlights in the lot buzzing orange over his parked truck but not bright enough to try touching Lambert’s grief.

When they were growing up, people who didn’t know better mistook Lambert and Geralt as twins for that shared ginger color, even though he and Geralt were near-perfect mirrors of each other in everything but Eskel’s muddy-brown hair. Little Lambert, a year younger in school, was not even distantly related to anyone in this town. 

And unlike Geralt, Lambert had more freckles than sense, weaselly-looking and scrawny even when he bulked up, temper quick to lash like a coal shot from the crack of the bonfire, teeth bared, tongue sharp, a nasty, thorny side to him that dug in and never forgave a wrong.

None of that showed through in the cut-strings hang of his head, the hospital breathing behind him and the empty night humming before him, letting himself be moved by Eskel’s palm.

That’s how he knew Lambert was well and truly fucked up this time. But what else could he be? What else would anyone be?

How did anybody even begin to give voice to something like this?

“Shit, man,” said Eskel, trying. “Fuck.”

“Don’t,” said Lambert, and so Eskel didn’t, just let his hand drop away and turned toward the hulk of his truck, letting Lambert choose to follow.

* * *

The burn of the dashboard display ticked full midnight just as Eskel swung the truck from asphalt to dirt, the start of the private drive up to Morhen Farm. Lambert, dozing against the passenger window, startled awake as his cheek bumped the door handle, truck tires catching the ruts in the road. 

Could use some grading and fresh gravel again, at least some filler in the worst of the mud hollows. Nothing but cracked earth right now, caught in the fourth week of a dryspell about to tip into drought if it kept up. He’d driven out with Vesemir this morning to check the bum well servicing the autowaterer in one of their pastures, a little pink of dawn cracking over the black backs of the cattle, his granddad rubbing at his whiskers while Eskel nosed at a thermos of black coffee, both of them swearing over the sad state of the aquifer. 

Supposed to be, he would take an early night and get up buttcrack of tomorrow to move that herd up closer to the barn into the paddock that meandered with a creek not yet gone dry. Lucky for Lambert, he’d skipped out on drinking himself into a stupor per usual and had conked out the old-fashioned way on the couch after a quick supper of microwaved Salisbury steak. 

His wildly vibrating phone had woken him to the silent flashing of an infomercial on the TV. The polite cadence of a voice pressed to his ear spoke things like _calling from Kaedwen County Hospital_ and _there’s been an accident_ and _listed as his emergency contact_. 

In the half-aware blur of sleep, Eskel’s brain had lurched right to his brother and gone _oh hell, oh holy hell, I should have called him more, I should have I should have--_

Until he remembered that he didn’t have a brother, he had a sister now and she was doing good, doing real good, and then felt guilty for the unconscious slip in pronouns. 

And then caught on what the woman on the phone was saying and his brain lurched sour all over again.

_Oh hell, oh holy hell, Lambert, I’m so fucking sorry, oh hell._

In the dimly-lit cab of the truck, only an instant flickered between Lambert’s head jostling up off the crook of the window in bleary-eyed confusion and the sucked deep breath of awareness. Eskel’s gut panged for him, wishing he could push him back down under the surface of sleep to stay there a few minutes longer. 

Eskel knew what that was like. 

To wake from a dream and for a slow blink forget how his life had turned out. He’d never wanted something like that for Lambert or for any of his crew or for anyone.

_Fuck._

Eskel drove slower as the dirt gave to fresher-laid gravel, truck rumbling past the looming, black shape of the garage and easing to a park in front of his trailer. He’d occupied the trailer years and years now and still had to stop himself from continuing on up toward the main farmhouse a few hundred yards off.

The porchlight was on up there, a yellow cone of light that meant Vesemir had heard him pull out about an hour ago and was waiting up, just in case. The old man was shrewd like that. Eskel didn’t love driving at night. Eskel didn’t have anywhere to be unless somebody was in trouble.

If it was anyone else but Lambert, he’d take them up to the house and sit them at the familiar table in the kitchen and have his granddaddy talk them through it slow and steady. Vesemir had this roundabout way of talking about things without talking about them, rambling out some story or another like a parable. Allegorical. Draw your own conclusions between the lines of what he said and didn’t say.

But things had always been complicated between Lambert and Vesemir, wobbling on the needle-sharp line between part-time boss and shoulda-been coulda-been father figure. Lambert’s impulsion toward rebellious resistance of authority had ended him in trouble on the farm and at school more times than Eskel could have dared for the risk of getting skinned alive by endless lectures.

But Vesemir never struck Lambert like he would have his boys, and then again, only struck his boys when they got into something that could have hurt bad. The real fear wasn’t of Vesemir’s hands but of his stony silence, stormcloud disappointment stored up in his turned down mouth, his stiff shoulders. 

Eskel’s grandaddy was hard but not mean and never laid a hand on Lambert and never scolded him too sharply. Eskel was smart enough to know why.

But if he took Lambert up to the house and sat him down in the kitchen, it would be like pinning a wounded coyote to the back of a trap. He might tame down listening to Vesemir’s voice rumble over the quiet notes of the oldie’s station in the background, or he might rile up and draw blood.

Easier to let it rest until morning or longer.

Eskel flicked his headlights a few times until the porchlight flicked in answer and then went dark. 

Like their own kind of Morse code. The intimacy of distance.

The cicada whirr of the summer night opened up to them as the truck doors groaned and slammed shut again. Lambert didn’t hesitate, boots crunching on gravel up to the porch and pulling the screendoor wide, Eskel letting it smack closed against the frame behind them. 

The trailer had been reserved for seasonal help before Eskel moved in, the porch built haphazard a decade or so back, crooked enough you could drop a beer bottle and have it roll from one end to the other. The place wasn’t much on the inside, one bedroom, one bath, bachelor-barren living room and kitchen, all of it stretched long to fit in a space like a shoebox.

Lambert didn’t bother going inside, just flopped on the futon on the porch and stretched to plug in the string lights stapled to the perimeter of the plyboard ceiling. Without asking, Eskel stomped to the old beer fridge and dragged out a pair of bottles from its frosted depths.

Used to joke that Lambert didn’t need an opener, he’d just chew off the bottlecap like an animal and spit. That always got him chugging half a beer in one go and howling long and high like a hunting dog while he tugged out the collar of Eskel’s shirt. It was funny to get Lambert all wound up and sloshed as quick as possible, knowing he’d launch quick into instigating some dumb shit for attention. Didn’t even have to be a girl there to impress like some other guys, just had to get enough beer in him and shake until he frothed over. 

“What is this shit?” Lambert asked, wiping the back of his mouth and squinting at the label. He had been civilized and used a bottle opener. “Aw fuck man, Geralt’s got to you. This is some indie crap.”

“It’s local,” Eskel said. “New brewery next town over.”

“Yeah, I bet it’s local. Collect it from the local urinal.”

“It ain’t that bad, you baby.”

“It’s piss water, Esk.”

“And Bud Light isn’t?”

“Where’s your vodka?”

“Out.”

“Whiskey?”

“Nope.”

“Come on, you’re killing me. Come on, man. I know you’re a drunk, what do you have?”

“You’re not wrong,” said Eskel, quick wheezy laughing only because it wasn’t too funny. “Thing about being a drunk is you drink it all.”

“Except Geralt’s weird shit.”

“Yeah, except Geralt’s weird shit.”

“How is h-- she?” 

Eskel’s chest warmed at the lightning-fast correction. Of all the guys, he hadn’t been so sure about telling Lambert about Geralt’s transition. Nothing could ever predict what he’d say or do, but when Eskel had told him, he’d just grinned and said _always knew he was a big fucking girl_. Not strictly politically correct or proper, but he slipped easy after that into the small shifts in language it took to be respectful.

“She’s good,” said Eskel, because she was. “She’s doing real good.”

Seemed happy and settling into a new sort of future. Present in Eskel’s life only as something that slipped back into his orbit on occasion. That’s how all of the old crew were now. Eskel holding still while the rest of them sailed out across their expanding lives. Only sometimes knocking back into him. Even Lambert, who’d stayed in town and moved up from motorcycle mechanic to salesman, didn’t come around much anymore. 

Until now.

In typical Lambert fashion, he didn’t just swing politely back into Eskel’s space but crashed hard and solid.

“Ugh,” grunted Eskel, making a face over a swig of Geralt’s weird shit. “You’re right this is definitely piss water.”

“Just dipped the bottle in a sewage plant and slapped some art on it.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“What is this label anyway? A wizard? Piss wizard.”

“Shut up and drink my weird shit, Lambo.”

“I’m not drinking this,” said Lambert. 

“Me neither, yeah.”

They drank the whole six pack in quick gulps and only with the porch roof spinning above them thought to check the alcohol content. 

“That’s why she drinks this shit,” slurred Lambert. 

“That’s why!” 

Eskel dropped a spent bottle to the ground, and it rolled all the way down to the end of the porch and clacked off the wall. He cackled.

It took a hell of a lot more these days to get him shit-faced, but the rolling buzz was pleasant, a numbed warmth around the edges of everything. Lambert had always been a lightweight and still was, drunk flush darkening the freckles on his nose and sharp cheekbones. He’d filled out some in the years since high school but still had the same gawky lean muscle weirdness and pointed features as ever, the kind of handsome that snuck up on you. 

And it always had. Snuck up on him. Lambert’s grin limned by a bonfire, the beads of sweat at his temple on a fly-muggy day in the fields, the wild, rakish tangle of his ginger mane, strain of his bent arms and swell of his shoulderblades. 

Didn’t mean anything really and wasn’t unique to Lambert. Eskel’d just always been that way, as likely to notice those little details about anyone, man or woman. Didn’t have a name for it either until Geralt’s little poet spelled it out for him. _Bisexual,_ he’d said with a little jut of his know-it-all chin and smug curve of his mouth, and Eskel had agreed just to shut him up. Not that it wasn’t true but that Jaskier talked too damn much if you let him have an opening.

And it didn’t mean much anyway, because Eskel didn’t go out to bars anymore and didn’t do fuck all and hadn’t had anyone he even wanted to fuck in ages. He’d given up on giving a shit about it too. Mostly.

Until somebody like Lambert looked at him that pretty.

A moment after the thought struck him, Eskel remembered just why Lambert was here in the first place. What had happened just hours ago in the belly of the county hospital. The warm feeling curdled and turned into a fresh pang of sympathy. He was just drunk enough not to hold his tongue.

“I didn’t know him that well,” said Eskel, fishing back through his memory. The span of years after his accident blurred and fumbled away from him, not because he couldn’t remember but because there wasn’t anything to remember. 

He’d turned sixteen and wrecked his truck and promptly shaved down his life to the white burn of a hospital ward and the grey sterility of physical therapy and the long, dark void of a life with all promise burnt up. It was his own damn fault that he only ever ran into old friends every so often and mostly on accident. He’d lost track of them all. He’d lost track of Lambert.

Maybe if he hadn’t, none of this would have--

“Didn’t know him really,” Eskel said, “but Aiden seemed like a real good guy.”

“Stop,” said Lambert, voice dark and heavy. “Don’t.”

And Eskel didn’t.

* * *

Eskel woke on the floor of the porch in the grey, fogged dawn to the dogs causing a ruckus over the sound of a vehicle crawling up the drive. 

Lambert jerked awake on the futon, gripping through the holes of the borrowed afghan shrugged over his body, and stiffened when he shoved himself up to look down the road.

A patrol car coasted to a stop in the drive, silently idling its blue and red lights.


	2. nothing but the ground left for you to fall to

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warnings** in this chapter for prison system references, drug-induced overdose, and character death
> 
> title of this brief chapter and the last from [fall of the star high school running back"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI8XDsZcjq0) by the mountain goats

“I picked him up on Friday, left work early. We’d talked about it a long time so yeah, he knew where he was staying, knew that I was coming. Met him on the outside, and he was happy, man. Always thought he looked so goofy with that buzz. Used to have hair longer than any of us. But he was-- yeah, yeah, then I drove him home. I called him something stupid like ‘sweetcheeks’, and he-- yeah, and then, I drove him right home. I have a one bedroom out near the tracks, yeah, yeah above the computer repair shop. It’s peaceful. Had him all set up. Got him the works. A toothbrush and shit, you know? Some shampoo, as a laugh. Beer. Got him all setup, and then the weekend was-- Pardon me, Officer, but that’s private stuff. Come on, just let a dead man-- ok--”

* * *

  
The buzzing drop ceiling light and his lumpy mauve couch and Aiden, wearing a ratty blanket like a cloak, wiggling his toes into Lambert’s thighs. _Fucking hell, my toes have been frozen for five fucking years_ , he said, sighing, and Lambert protested the abuse of his legs, moaning that he’d have bruises (he did but not for long enough, fading like the rest, praying for those busted blood vessels to slow in their healing, stay, stay).

When Aiden didn’t let up, he squirreled over and sat full-bodied on his legs, and when the legs tried to buck him like an ornery bull, he squirmed higher and sat right on Aiden’s chest until he wheezed out some wisecrack about Lambert stress eating without him and Lambert farted on him and delicately wafted the air with his hands and Aiden laughed and laughed and reached up and just held him for a hitch of breath, just embracing each other sprawled all awkward on the couch.

* * *

  
“We stayed in all weekend, ordered takeout. Had work on Monday, and he said he’d be cool, would just watch some TV and nap some, you know? Told him he needed a hobby. Told him I better come home to some macaroni art I could hang on the fridge. Told him not to think too much about anything. I’d go shopping after work and come home and we’d make dinner. That risotto recipe-- you know the one, Esk. With the mushrooms? Yeah, I bought the good wine. Probably we’d get drunk in the meantime and burn the risotto. Expensive shit. You know like-- yeah, Officer, yeah, except I came home after work and found him--”

* * *

  
His place was dark, blinds shut to the summer evening. A thunderstorm boiling out there, a ridge of blue clouds along the acres of fields that hugged the road but not yet touching the golden haze of the day. Lambert had skidded his bike over the grit of the railroad tracks in his haste to pull in and be home. Would have been a shame to lose the bottle of wine that bumped in his backpack. Bit of road rash be damned, that shit was expensive.

Inside, it was cool and dark, and the window faced the wrong direction for the sun to reach in through the crooked blinds. Television blue touched the walls and ceiling of the living room, flickering with a laugh track, humming over the slight warp of his shit antenna.

Lambert strode to the open kitchen and plunked the wine bottle down on the counter, hollering for Aiden to rise and shine, sleeping beauty, it’s a beautiful goddamn day out there and we got some good shit here. Got some good ass shit, and we’re making my brother’s risotto recipe. Got fancy mushrooms. I’m spoiling you, bud, I know, I know, I--

Aiden, all bundled up in a blanket burrito on the couch, the fringe of it tickling the bald fuzz of his head. Said he couldn’t get warm for five years, said he never had enough socks, never enough blankets.

Moving into the glare of the screen, Lambert stepped on the lid of a prescription pill bottle.

But he knew before that. Maybe he knew the moment he skidded over the tracks. Maybe he knew on Friday when he skimmed the peach fuzz of Aiden’s hair and called him little darlin’. Like he’d known when they were both seventeen, Lambert lookout while Aiden was pawning off Oxy under the bleachers, knowing how it would end when he’d stumbled into him after, pupils blown and pressing into the twisted dark of the metal structure, rubbing his face on Lambert’s throat like a cat.

He knew it would end messy, even then. Like a useless precognition. Aiden, caught in a trap and spiraling even before he got shipped off to federal. Aiden, careening, skidding. Aiden, stiff on his stupid mauve couch and unresponsive even as the emergency operator guided him through compressions, the sour vomit taste of his lips, the useless punch of the ribcage under the meat of his palms.

Aiden, cold as a fucking glacier and Lambert, praying, wishing, crying that he’d let him tuck his stupid pointy toes under his damn thighs every night for a lifetime, hell, fucking hell, he’d warm them in his mouth one by one if he asked, just quit fucking napping, shithead, wake the fuck up, rise and shine, wakey wakey, eggs and--

* * *

  
“No, he didn’t know I had the drugs. For a dental surgery, I don’t know, man. It was-- Percocet? A whole bottle. I know, I know. I didn’t know, and he didn’t know. I didn’t think about it. I should have. I didn’t even know I had them, and I didn’t-- I should’ve fucking-- I didn’t know. I didn’t know shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry sorry sorry sorry
> 
> next chapter: dogs n goats n cows n quads


	3. thin line 'tween joy and pain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from the titular ['loud and heavy'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwa0BPlr9_Q) by cody jinks
> 
> there's a lot of farming bullshit in this chapter and also i lied about there being cows in it i'm sorry I accidentally stretched it into two chapters for no reason

Afterward, the cop clapped both of them on the back a few times and mumbled his condolences and slipped back into the patrol car and trundled off down the drive. Lambert sat on the futon looking out into the steadily lifting fog, not saying anything and not showing anything on his face, while Eskel sat on an overturned bucket near the hinge of the screendoor, pretending like he wasn’t staring. Waiting for some kind of inevitable reaction. Some kinda eruption. 

Lambert had delivered the whole story like he was talking about the weather, drawl kicking into his voice, eyes going a little distant. Had they gone misty when he got to the gritty parts? Eskel couldn’t say. And didn’t know what to say after, letting the heavy silence lay down on them like the fog over the fields.

“We went to high school with him,” said Lambert finally.

“Huh?”

“The cop. Year younger than me. You probably didn’t know him.”

“Huh,” said Eskel.

“Dumb as a fuckin’ brick in school. That’s cops for you. Bottom of the food chain.” He grinned, a quick flash of pearly whites.

Eskel, thinking about the body lying in the dark of Lambert’s shit apartment, couldn’t quite get himself to smile. He leaned forward on his knees, wrists dangling between his thighs and met the grin with something that must have been a grimace.

“Look, Lambert, I’m--” He foresaw it. The clenching of his jaw and tightening around his eyes and spitting of insults. He knew his condolences wouldn’t soothe or placate, and so he let them fade out. Lambert took to soothing worse than if he’d been struck. “You stink, man. Go use my shower. We’ve got chores.”

Lambert grumblingly agreed, tossed a clean towel and a change of clothes, and Eskel brewed up a pot of hot coffee listening to the shower hiss and sputter while the idiot crooned out some baritone notes and did his very best to drain the trailer’s entire hot water tank.

Sound of an ambling vehicle spitting gravel took him outside to meet Vesemir leaning out the window of his truck. The old man had had the same weathered expression through all of Eskel’s memory, not changing for time or circumstance or tragedy, the same level gaze while talking about a bumper crop harvest as an early frost. Vesemir looked at him with the flat line of his mouth tightening the sag of his jowls, his eyes hard.

“Get those cattle moved up today,” said Vesemir. “Lambert can make himself useful.”

Eskel wasn’t even surprised that he already knew or had guessed, was no longer surprised when the old man knew everything and anything under the sun. 

“Slacking off?”

“Might have a buyer for the whole herd,” he said. “Want ‘em calved out first though. They’ll go spring sometime. Preg check this week and the open ones will go.”

“Right,” said Eskel, not liking to think about what the old man had announced to him before this planting season, that his days of farming were all but over and he was going ahead with negotiations to sell. Everything but the immediate acres around the farmhouse and main barn. Said he’d known this was coming since the twins were boys. Too smart and too worldly to be simple farmers. The industry sprawling meaner and emptier. The land giving up what it could and yet never giving enough.

Parcel by parcel, piece by piece, the farm dwindled around them. Already, though the Morhen family still owned hundreds of acres, more and more of those fields were rented off to other farmers, ones with equipment that gleamed and strong men to spare. 

Morhen Farms had only aging tractors and combines, the old man, and Eskel, whose body couldn’t manage daily farmwork the same as it could before his accident, bum leg and bum shoulder and bum spine all working in spiteful tandem to twist all his muscles into a competition of seeing which could get him to throw in the towel first. 

All the other seasonal farmhands aged out or gone on to more profitable ventures. Only Eskel, left behind. Eskel, living in his rusty tin can, limping through his morning chores when his joints kicked up their complaining. 

Their family had bred beef cattle on this land for almost a century, and this spring, the last of the main herd would go. Eskel didn’t even fucking like cattle, could never get them to move off the way Vesemir could with barely a flap. Standing out in the pasture he always saw that spark of dumb meanness in their eyes. Shouldn’t make him feel so empty, thinking about losing them. 

“Eskel.” 

Vesemir’s rumble of a voice almost startled him. The old man rarely called him by his name.

“That boy’s always been a tough case,” said the old man. “He giving you trouble?”

“As much as usual.”

“Always scared it would be him going down that road.” 

_Scared_. Vesemir didn’t admit to fear lightly. Didn’t fear hard work or ornery bulls or bank men but feared for a guy like Lambert.

“He’s acting tough,” said Eskel. “Won’t talk about it.”

“It’ll come. Explosively, if you’re not careful.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Inside the trailer, Lambert was leaning on the counter helping himself to coffee, his freshly-toweled hair all damp frizz, little droplets of water cruising down the back of his neck and wetting the loose collar of a borrowed olive-green t-shirt. 

“You’re still shit at making coffee,” said Lambert, gesturing with a _She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy_ mug.

“Yeah, your wailing distracted me.”

“Horrible acoustics in there. Also somebody stole all your shampoo and replaced it with some floral shit. Bummer.”

“You smell lovely, Lambo. Too bad you’re about to smell like cow shit.”

Lambert groaned.

“Old man thinks I’m still his hired man, huh? Thinks he can just boss me around for nothing.”

“I’m putting you up for nothing, asshole,” said Eskel, clapping him on the shoulder. “And your rent’s running cows with me today.”

Lambert groaned more theatrically.

Eskel hissed over broken yolks in his pan of fried eggs and spam while Lambert sucked down most of the coffee.

The pair of them trudged out through the dew-wet yard together to feed the dogs.

The trailer stood a short walk from the farm’s main equipment garage, a massive, open bay of a building with attached tool storage and workshop, both buildings flanked by a field of knee-high corn that faded into a windbreak several dozen acres away. The dogs lived in a stretch of outdoor kennels along the far wall of the garage, each with an entry flap to a matching kennel on the inside.

A steady whine began as they trudged up, not yet grown to the steady racket it would soon enough. 

The Morhen family had always kept a dog or two, but Eskel’s interest in herding dogs had grown that number significantly. Starting as a hobby to maybe make a bit of cash selling puppies, he’d realized soon enough he wasn’t about to make shit breeding dogs. Especially given that he was loathe to part with most. 

“Man, how many dogs do you have now, buddy?” asked Lambert, eyeing the wiggling creatures that leaped against the chainlink of the kennels. Eskel scratched at his chin in thought, but as he ducked into a storage shed to fish about in the bin of dog food stored there, the bellowing of the hungry dogs swallowed any response he may have made.

Pressing a stack of stainless steel bowls against Lambert’s chest, he shrugged, waving a grain scoop, and hollered, “you count them!” 

And Lambert did, loudly and with increasing judgment in his voice, playing at being shocked and appalled, as Eskel instructed him which bowls to slide into the feeding hatch of which kennels. A dozen kennels crowded beside the garage but some held more than one dog, mostly siblings he’d never bothered separating, mostly cattle dogs or cattle dog mutts, all quick to lunge at their food bowls as they were shoved through.

As Lambert neared the end of the row, Eskel handed over two flakes of alfalfa from a cut bale which the younger man accepted with an inquisitive tip of his head, the hay pressed flat between his palms.

“Hey Esk, some sheep got in this pen and ate your dog,” drawled Lambert, opening the gate of the last kennel. 

“Shut it, that’s Lil Bleater. She’s a goat.” 

“A goat? What’s she for? Milking? Town mascot?”

“She’s not for anything, shithead. She’s a goat. Thinks she’s a dog anyhow. And watch out, she’ll--” 

Lambert yowled as the she-goat chomped on the hem of his shirt and tugged. He tossed the alfalfa and leapt back, door swinging shut.

“Your weird dog tried to kill me. I’m suing for damages.”

“What damages? Did you shit yourself?”

“Ate my shirt.”

“That’s my shirt, dumbass.”

“Can’t prove that in a court of law.”

“Come on, let the dogs out now. Chores ain’t done.”

Unleashed in a flurry of wagging tails and wiggling bodies, sixteen dogs and one goat charged around them as one of the over-sized garage doors lifted, admitting them into a wide bay that stood mostly empty except for a smattering of assorted equipment and several pieces-parts of sprint cars up on blocks. Eskel whistled here and there to keep wandering dogs out of trouble, but largely, the pack stuck together, bounding in circles around them and milling at their feet.

“Old man really is selling the place, huh?”

Rumors spread fast in towns like this. Most folks knew that Morhen Farms was on its last gasps.

A farmer didn’t sell off his combines without the whole county knowing. Next decade, the farmhouse and trailer might be hemmed in by some new housing development instead of farmland.

Lambert whistled into the cavernous space, once occupied by combines and tractors and rakes and semis.

The noise echoed.

And was returned by a chorus of distant bleating.

“Hey Esk, your last tractor’s making sheep noises.”

Lil Bleater trotted ahead of them, boldly leading the rabble toward an array of metal fencing in the back corner. Polycarbonate windows set high in the garage walls let in streams of morning light across a pastoral scene better suited to a cozy stable than the empty garage. A thick bed of straw lay across a pen full of ewes and lambs, all straining forward against the feed bunk that stretched the length of the pen and bleating miserably.

“Welcome to my uh… sheep barn.”

“Sheep. Since when are you into sheep?”

“Since I got drunk and bought twelve bred ewes off Craigslist this winter. Lambed ‘em out myself in April.”

“Sheep,” Lamber said, with the same cadence as a curse word. “Anyone ever tell you you’re a crazy fucking bastard?”

“S’been said.”

“You gonna let those bastards loose too? Join our merry entourage? Maybe parade into town? Do they think they’re fuckin’ dogs too? Taught ‘em any tricks yet?”

“Shut up and help me feed, asshole. Don’t let the lambs bite you.”

Together, they divvied out scoops of feed from trash cans outside the pen and spread it along the bunk, the black nostrils of the sheep snorting and flaring, jostling one another for a spot. The lambs were three months now and nearly big enough to wean, pressing beside their woolly mothers and eating just as voraciously.

Eskel shooed Lil Bleater out of the bunk, and she headbutted him in the back of the knee reproachfully. He patted the curve of her horn, thumb slipping across the grooves. He’d raised her from a newborn, rejected by her mother and bottlefed to save her life. Lived on the porch the first month or so of her life, then moved out into a kennel with the dogs. Would have kept her with the sheep except she had proven herself a wily escape artist and socially incompetent with anything but dogs.

“Crazy fucking bastard,” Lambert muttered under his breath, watching Eskel fondly pat the wily animal.

“Gonna build a barn soon enough,” said Eskel. “Nothing too fancy. Just an ordinary sheep operation.”

“Weren’t you Morhens supposed to be getting out of farming?”

“Not me. Not sure I’m good for much else.”

“Fuck, Eskel,” said Lambert, and he realized a moment too late that that sentiment probably sounded a little pathetic.

“Naw, I mean, it’s what I want. It’s good. More manageable than fuckin’ cattle anyways,” said Eskel, scratching the rough base of Bleater’s horns. “And speaking of, we better get those cows moved up.”

“You sure you don’t have some more impractical livestock you want to show me first, huh? A bevy of alpaca? A herd of emu? Some fuckin’ bison?”

With Bleater and the rest returned to their kennels, excepting his two gamest cattle dogs which balanced on the back of Eskel’s four-wheeler, barking over the din of the motor, he led the way down the drive and onto the road toward the pastures, Lambert roaring behind.

The fog had fizzled away and left a blue sky morning, the heat kicking up in clouds of dust plumed behind the four-wheelers as the paved road returned to grit. They drove abreast, no traffic way out here so early in the morning, none likely except their neighbors down the road or the odd delivery. They drove at reckless speeds, Lambert the first to give into the temptation to whoop into the buffeting wind. 

He stood, bent over the handlebars of the four-wheeler, and whooped and whooped, his red curls streaming behind him, all sharp, lunatic grin and wild eyes. 

Eskel’s heart thundered, mindful of the dogs slumped down in the back basket or he’d dare to speed faster and race Lambert out across the flat road for miles. 

Feeling like a boy again, nothing but the fields and the road and sky, nothing but Lambert barrelling on beside him. Before dark apartments and dead friends, before the grind of joints and burn of scarred muscle, before his body split like ripe fruit against the black tar of the road. Nothing but the road and the dust and the blue of the horizon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> farmer eskel now. next time: lambert pov runnin' cows, maybe some geralt


	4. you ain't never gonna be the same

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warning** for descriptions of car accident induced injuries and hospitalization

Lambert had missed farmwork, the flat expanse of Morhen land tipped along a plain, blue sky, the baying dogs and the four-wheeler jumping under his thighs, the clanging of gates with his fingernails catching in grooves of rust as he swung them, the thin haze of dust on the horizon when the droughts got this bad, the ground dried in tire track and cattle hoof ruts like a memory of the spring flood.

And Eskel.

He’d missed Eskel.

He forgot sometimes, especially doing shit like this again, not to look around expecting somebody a hundred pounds scrawnier with a few scraggly chin hairs and a smooth, baby-clean face.

Lambert fiddled with the chain along another gate and stepped back to pull it open and caught sight of Eskel sitting back with the engine idling, one of his little blue dogs wiggled into his lap, and for a second, Lambert didn’t quite recognize him. A stranger sat there, letting the dog’s pink tongue lap the dust from his calloused palm.

They’d been of a size for a summer, when Lambert shot up into a growth spurt while Eskel’s body burned through enough food to feed an army but never gained more than a scrap of gristle. Until something metabolic snapped and fizzled, and he re-shaped into something broad all over and at home in the bulk, leaving Lambert behind again in his wiry leanness.

Sophomore year, he went first-string linebacker on their school’s football team and ploughed them bulldozer steady all the way to states. Just to rub it in, the star athlete of Kaedwen High School bloomed into little darling academic also, winning some nerdy math competition and championing the debate team.

Didn’t seem right that somebody could be that big and ugly and that damn smart too. Lambert breathed wrong on an exam and flunked it outright, all the numbers mixed up and blurring. Playing tutor, Eskel’s ragged fingernails smoothed under the scribbled lines, voice slow and rumbling, hunched down over the breadth of his shoulders to fit in the cramped school desk and explain the problem to him one figure at a time.

Lambert wasn’t listening. Was looking at the bulbous dip of the nose broken last year at wrestling practice, the ridge of his brow tickled by the fallen fringe of his dark hair, the dirt in the crevices of his thick fingers, the swell of his creased palm giving to the browned forearm dark with wisps of hair. The bow of Eskel’s mouth, too full for a boy’s. The little twitch of a smile at the edges when he drawled _come on, Lambo, concentrate for half a damn second._

Now, he looked at Eskel as his hands curved around the throttle and trundled through the open gate, avoiding the worst of the ruts so the impatient dogs wouldn’t be pitched free of the four-wheeler.

He’d put on weight in the past few years, a beer gut softness through his middle, a rounding through his face, but somehow, he loomed bigger in Lambert’s memory of him as a lean-muscled kid than he did now.

“You daydreaming, kid?”

Eskel’s voice jarred him out of standing there fingers curled around the gate, and he clambered back onto the quad, revved it to jerk through the open gate and leapt off again to pull the gate shut in a whine of hinges that had seen better days.

That summer, the summer Eskel was chomping at the bit to turn sixteen in July, their teenaged rabble reached heights of glory no little nothing farmboys had ever known before or would again. Not old enough to drive or drink or fuck but managing all three buoyed by Eskel’s linebacker fame that won him the favor of the older boys. That favor bought them entry to tailgate functions under the stars, to moonshine jars slippery with condensation, to doe-eyed girls in cut-offs and the stink of diesel while flags flapped on trucks spinning donuts through the mud of the fields.

July crested with a plume of thundering fireworks over the backfield. Eskel’s big hand swallowed the back of his neck. Lambert saw him backlit by the bronze of a bonfire, his silhouette limned and head tipped back to howl, his grin all teeth and clean and whole.

Lambert forgot sometimes.

Eskel looked back at him, a dry wind ruffling his long hair. He’d let it grow into something of a mullet, tufts sticking out along his collar, sides slicked behind his ear. It looked ridiculous in a way that suited him. He looked like the older farmhands of their youth, stained workshirt and worn denim and cowboy boots. He spit into the rut of a dry ditch, waiting on Lambert to remount his quad and ride off again, and as he did, he turned in his seat to face him, the cracked padding of the seat groaning under his shifting weight.

Lambert just forgot about it sometimes was all.

The missing half of his face.

All that bigness, all the larger than life ease that had simmered a pit of jealousy sloughed off like the necrotic tissue from hollowed cheeks. Road rash abraded down to bone. The skin grafts failing along the curl of his lip and snagging into a permanent snarl. The pus oozing putrid green, and his forehead going hot and eyes rolling.

 _Your friend’s lucky_ , the nurse had said when Lambert visited the first time.

Yeah, real fuckin’ fortunate. Cracked himself through a windshield and still had half his face to show for it. Some badly-wrenched muscles, joints knocked out of whack, fractured vertebrae but nothing needing splinting or surgery. No internal injuries. Minimal brain damage. He burned with fever but didn’t go septic the way his little girlfriend who’d been his passenger did, all her organs swelling up with infection and threatening total collapse.

Eskel floated on a wave of pain meds, never awake, and Geralt slumped greasy-haired and brittle over his bedside, never sleeping.

How small Eskel looked, how he shrunk into atrophy, all that simmering potential drying to a husk.

The scars had healed in deep grooves and pockets and keloid bubbles along the right side of his face, abraded from scalp to curled lip. No more winning beauty contests. No more pretty boy star athlete.

Had to relearn how to walk. Didn’t graduate high school. Sixteen and snuffed to a pinprick that had nothing left to catch on, sucking back booze like nothing else, rattling around all the town haunts with the other guys like he hadn’t skinned his whole life down to nothing on the blacktop. For all their pretending, none of them were ever quite the same.

But he lived, after all of it.

Aiden didn’t.

“Lambert,” said Eskel over the rumble of their four-wheelers, concern creasing his brow, tightening the pink skin of his scars. Lambert saw him wanting to ask, wanting to talk about what had the younger man so uncharacteristically quiet and checked out.

Didn’t want to talk about it.

If he really tried, he could just forget a while. Be fifteen again cradled in the heat of the summer before everything upended. Drive out over the open pasture to round up the cattle like he still slept in the spare room of the farmhouse most nights and creaked down the stairs and out into the black dark for morning chores.

Didn’t want to think about it.

Just a week ago, he’d been making plans, stocking up. Scrolling through Netflix thinking what dumb shit they’d binge, planning a trip or two. Little things like a hike out along the creek off the main road. A bit of fishing.

If he wasn’t careful, he’d catch himself daydreaming same as he had the past few months. Years.

_When Aiden gets out, we’ll--_

Lambert slung himself back into the seat of the quad and peeled out across the span of packed earth, flashing a grin at Eskel caught in his dust cloud.

“We got cattle to wrangle, Esk,” hollered Lambert, lurching over the low swells of ruts in the pasture, reverberations of tillings in years past. “Hurry it up!”

The dogs barreled down off the four-wheeler to race barking and nipping at its tread while Eskel gunned it to catch up.

Lambert leaned into the wind, eyeing the cattle grazing in clumps in the distance.

If he didn’t look back, he could imagine Eskel young and whole riding up behind him. That they’d woken up just this morning after a bonfire moonshine night, smelling of smoke and grumbling about the work. No twisted wreck or churn of black smoke. No hospital antiseptic stink. That all of it still spread out unknown before them, all the years, all the daydreams.

Lambert didn’t look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i still didn't write about cows actually somebody shout at me


	5. moonlight raisin' from the grave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title is from [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSYkikkitS0) haunting bitch of a song
> 
>  **content warning** for brief reference to suicidal ideation, hospitals/accident-induced trauma and recovery, overall poor mental health and coping skills
> 
> also, geralt now uses she/her pronouns and refers to herself as a woman/Eskel's sister but that may not be consistent throughout the story, especially in flashbacks

“Don’t know how he’s doing. Won’t let me talk about it, and I don’t think I can keep bringing it up,” said Eskel against the flat screen of his phone, pressing his face against the window of his truck to peer up at Lambert’s apartment above the computer repair place.

Grocery bags cluttered the backseat, an indulgent mix of absolute shit, but the concession for the little idiot staying another few nights at Eskel’s place was that Lambert picked the food. Despite his insistence that he’d cook them anything, Lambert apparently had the taste of a sugar-high toddler and crammed the cart full of processed foods. And alcohol.

Took them the whole morning to move the cows out through the pasture gate and up the main road, the two four-wheelers and the nipping dogs driving them at a steady pace through the dust, shouting and waving their hands when one of them got turned around. The pasture where Vesemir wanted them dipped into a valley around the creek, willows swaying over the water, and the black cows trotted into the swaying grass and right to the edge of the creek, wetting their hooves in the grit of the shallows.

Lambert had been quieter than usual, and more than once, Eskel had caught him staring, some expression he couldn’t pin down darkening his face.

“Yen says--”

Geralt’s voice was familiar and rumbling but with something softer about it now, some touch of lightness. She’d been living as a woman for almost a year now, and Eskel had worried it would be hard, that he’d slip up. And he had sometimes if they went too long without talking, falling into imagining Geralt as his moody, hunched, miserable brother. It was almost a relief when he heard from or saw her again, and everything realigned.

Somehow, Geralt was happy. He had a sister, and she was doing just fine.

“Yen says trauma hits everybody different.”

“No shit.”

“Like, take the both of us for an example--”

“I’d really rather not,” said Eskel. Didn’t want to think about that right now. About him ricocheting into drinking too goddamn much and Geralt’s hair going white. “Goddamn, Geralt, you see one shrink and suddenly you’re an expert?”

“Not the shrink,” said his sister, something so bizarrely mellow in her voice. “Just lucky enough to have some kinda support system. Space to think about this shit. It’s not really healthy to keep it all plugged up.”

“God, Yen’s good for you.”

“Thank you,” said a smoky voice, clear enough that Yen must have her lips pressed close to Geralt’s cheap flip phone.

“Hey, Yen.”

“Hi Eskel. Sorry about your friend’s friend.”

“He’ll be alright,” he said, lying. How could anybody be alright after something like this?

Over the line, there was a noise like a sigh and then an unmistakable kiss.

“Aw, you guys aren’t doing what I think you’re doing while I talk to you, are you?”

“No,” said Geralt, her voice dipping.

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not doing anything. I’m just trying to have a normal ass and important conversation with my brother but _some people_ \--” A breathy sigh through the line, the sound of something wet. “I promise they weren’t doing this when you called, man. Really don’t know what’s wrong with them.”

“Your poet there?”

“Unfortunately-- _ow_ , Jask--”

“I should let you go.”

“No, no, Eskel, I’m leaving the room. I’m-- ah, they’re following me. I’d go outside, but I don’t think even that would stop them.”

“This one of those trauma things? All of us handling shit different?”

“Probably,” said Geralt with a rumble of laughter. The sound changed, a distant blur of city noises as she stepped outside. “Though I wouldn’t suggest trying this with Lambert.”

Eskel stared at the white face of the building, the OPEN sign on the computer repair shop glaring blue and red, the upper windows grimy and dark.

“Don’t know what to do about it.”

“I’m coming up for the funeral next week,” said his sister. “I know Coen is too.”

“Why? None of us knew Aiden. Not really.”

“We know Lambert. That counts.”

“I’m no good for this, Geralt. Should have been somebody else here with him. You know I’m shit at this.”

“Too bad,” she said. “You’re there with him now. He doesn’t have anybody left but you.”

“Shit,” said Eskel. “He’s been in there a while. I better--”

“Please do. I told you going outside wouldn’t stop them. Goddamnit it, Yenne-- I’ve got to go.”

“Have fun,” he said, and Geralt laughed, light and soft. God, out of all of them, how did Geralt end up the most well-adjusted.

“Love you, Esk,” she said, and wasn’t that just something? Didn’t think they even said shit like that back when they were young.

Definitely never said it even when it was all they had, that love. Not in the bright white of the hospital rooms or after. Not when Geralt’s hair went white and frizzy at the roots. Not when Eskel ran his hands through it, following with scissors, snipping loose the red.

Compounding traumas. The type of love that shook you. Careening over the white line and half dying like a stupid fucking idiot and Geralt the one haunted enough to go grey over it. What kind of fuckhead did that make Eskel? Watching his sister's brain burn up over trauma that wasn't even hers and not knowing what the fuck to do about it. Letting her veer away from him. Sheer luck that she tangled somewhere good and rooted.

“Yeah, yeah, love you too,” he remembered to say, something heavy caught in his throat.

* * *

Lambert took too damn long coming down, so Eskel went up, creaking up the narrow stairwell and feeling too damn big for all of it, itchy in his skin. The apartment door stood cracked, keys dangling in the lock, and he pressed inside to find it dark. Fought the feeling that he was walking into a morgue.

Lambert had taken a long damn time up here. Just had to grab his laptop and phone charger and some spare clothes and shit, but Eskel had sat thumping his palms against the wheel to a quarter of an album of George Jones’ greatest hits with something going sour in his stomach. Finally dredged up the energy to go up, the rubber stair tread muddy beneath his boots, a bare bulb flickering overhead.

He imagined Lambert coming home, whistling, grocery bags swinging bottle of wine under one arm, hopeful, unknowing.

Eskel stepped into the dark of Lambert’s kitchen and struggled to let his eyes adjust. A light warmed the hallway, and he headed that way toward the bedroom. Stopped still when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Something in the shadows of the living room.

For a startled breath, his brain conjured up horrors. The grey hands of a corpse reaching out from the dark. The haloed glow of the hospital lobby burning out into the blackness of the grave.

But it was just Lambert, kneeling on the ground shrugged up against the coffee table, shoulders bowed forward and shaking.

_Oh Lambert._

“Hey,” he said, pitching his voice soft, but Lambert still jerked up, narrowly missing banging his head on the underside of the coffee table. He went stiff and didn’t look round, back of his head a tumble of wild curls.

If Eskel was less scared of getting bit, he’d stumble over and touch him between the shoulderblades. Instead, he just stood there on the edge of the transition from kitchen linoleum to living room carpet, hovering, rooted to the floor. Coward.

“Go ‘way,” slurred Lambert. He’d been crying. Fuck. “I got all my shit, I just--”

“It’s ok.”

“Not really.”

“Yeah,” Eskel breathed. “Yeah, it’s not but that’s ok too.”

“Go away. I’ll be down in a bit. I just have to--”

“No.”

“‘Scuse me?”

“Think I’ll stay here,” said Eskel.

“Oh piss off,” said Lambert. “You don’t have to babysit.”

“Sorry, kid, I kinda do.”

“Worried I’ll off myself too?”

Said so fucking matter of fact, flat, no warp of grief, his voice steady. Eskel felt a touch of guilt over being glad for that. He’d never been good around too much emotion. Never known how to comfort somebody while they cried.

But he owed Lambert something. Maybe it was Geralt’s open _love you_ still so fresh in his mind that sparked a bit of bravery in him. Nobody else there to do it. Just him. Poor Lambert.

“Honest? Yeah,” Eskel managed. “I never got a clue what you’ll do, Lambert. Can’t take that chance.”

“You sayin’ I’m a basket case?”

“I’m saying life’s better when you’re around.”

“Real cute,” said Lambert, his tone gone bitter. He didn’t move to get up from kneeling on the floor.

Eskel found himself staring at the bunched fabric of his socks along upturned soles. The hem of the borrowed olive-green shirt, too damn big for him, tickled the edge of his heels. If he was braver, he’d flop down on the couch and pass a hand through Lambert’s hair.

“I mean it, man,” he said. “You’re my brother. I care about you being ok.”

“Gay.”

“Shut up, asshole, I’m trying to be sincere here. I’m trying to help.”

“Yeah and I’m trying to be a basket case in peace.”

“Talking about it might help,” said Eskel. “You never know.”

“Thought you told me to shut up.”

“This isn’t something you can just bottle up and ignore. Have to deal with it eventually.”

“Oh fuck that,” said Lambert, his voice lowering to a growl. “Real fucking rich, coming from you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Hell, Eskel, you’ve never dealt with any of your fucking shit.”

“This isn’t about--”

“Like hell it is.” Loud and sharp in the stillness of the apartment. No road noise out here. Nothing but Lambert’s anger rising and catching like the sting of a whip. “Like hell I’m going to let you tell me how to deal with shit, Eskel. You don’t get to play therapist with me. You of all people.”

“That’s not fair, and you know it.”

“You know what?” Lambert twisted around to look at him, the hallway light catching on his pale profile. All clenched teeth and taut tendons. Red-eyed. Ugly. Coyote sharp and primed to sink his teeth deep, snapping his jaws. Eskel loomed too big for the little apartment, his hands tucked in his pockets, his shoulders hunched forward, boots tipping back and forth over the ridge of the floor transition. Easy target.

He braced for it, the lash of meanness he knew would come. He readied himself, and it still carved him open like gutting a trophy kill, sternum to pelvis.

“If you weren’t such a fuck-up, maybe none of this would have happened, huh? You wrecked us. All of us. Might not have even met Aiden, if you hadn’t-- Fuck you. You don’t get to tell me how I’m supposed to deal. Not you. Not you.”

Fuck.


	6. livin' life through the night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **contains** references to incarceration, drug mentions, and getting into some more grieving

Lambert regretted it before the words had even hit the stale air of the apartment and sunk, but there wasn’t fuck all he could do about taking them back.

And then it was all silence, fumbling down out of the dim hollow of the apartment and into the blinding light of a summer’s day, climbing up into the cab of Eskel’s truck, turning onto the potholed main road toward the farm. Neither of them saying a single word. Quiet humming like an accusation.

Wasn’t fair to drag Eskel through shit he wasn’t to blame for. Not really.

Everybody carried their own bullshit. Made their own mistakes.

 _Shit_ , but they’d only been boys, all of them. There was the real unfairness. Choices they couldn’t possibly be expected to see the other side of. So fucking young.

Eskel, sixteen and still warm from the bonfire, wet his lips on a jar of moonshine and twisted his keys in the ignition.

Aiden sold Oxy to a cop.

Choices. Mistakes.

Meanwhile, Lambert himself was one long string of mistakes. A melted conglomeration of them, most of them made for him. The mistake his momma made in loving his daddy. The mistake in thinking a baby would mellow him, would straighten him out. Then, sticking around through the worst of it. Turning aside when his daddy disciplined him most nights after dinner, like if she was quiet he wouldn’t spin it on her.

Lambert had thought he and his buddies would be as close as they were as boys forever. Just them and the fields and the work.

Thought that they would always be the people that they were, predictable as the seasons.

Eskel, smart and cool and destined for something great. Geralt, walking encyclopedia of shit no one cared about but sure to make it out of this town. Coen, born to a farmhand and likely to be one his whole life but the kinda guy who was made for work like that, proud in it. Lambert, most likely to not amount to fuck all.

He’d been right about the last at least.

But hadn’t counted on the rest splintering the way they did. Eskel burning out and hunkering down. Geralt wrecked in his shadow and nearly unable to haul himself free. Coen the only one with any ambition, moving down south to be some fancy windmill technician. Got himself a young wife and a baby now.

And Lambert, draining the past half decade of his life down to a waiting game. Hibernation.

_When Aiden gets out, that’s when life will really start again._

He’d thought he could love Aiden whole, could erase the past five years one fresh memory at a time. Replace the time they’d lost and go backwards, slot easily back into each other’s lives. Be sixteen again, snugged under Aiden’s arm in the swing of a hammock, rubbing his lips below the crease of his arm, sunburn-hot and freckled, imagining they could meld together into one body, filter in and love him from the inside out.

Among all the other fuck-ups, he couldn’t let himself believe that that devotion had been a mistake.

Eskel drove with one hand on the wheel and the other slung out the window, tapping the frame of the truck along to the crooning of the old timey country record on the radio. He didn’t look at Lambert and didn’t say anything, watching clouds streak the summer sky over the landscape.

He slowed to drive through town, the narrow faces of the houses leaping up close to the road, the sidewalk rippled with the roots of trees long-cut. Town looked the same as it always had except with more and more of the little hole in the wall businesses boarded up and vacant. There's been some big, messy argument years ago over whether to let corporate places like Starbucks and Subway slither into the gaps that ended when the powers that be plowed a new four lane highway the county over and shored it up with clusters of hollow strip malls, fast food, the Wal-Mart.

“Remember when that used to be a bowling alley,” said Eskel at a stoplight, startling him with the roughness of his low voice. Lambert sat up straighter. Would it be that easy? Harsh words forgotten? Eskel was pointing at a low-slung building faced with glass block windows, the deep-set front entrance standing grey and arced with blue graffiiti.

“No, I hit twenty-five and now my memory’s startin’ to go,” said Lambert, rolling his eyes. “Of course I remember. Only went out of business a few years ago.”

“Yeah, but everybody quit going years before that. Remember how sticky it was?”

“Polished the floors with rum and coke, yeah.”

“Remember that time Geralt broke a bowling ball in half?”

“Yeah, I’m an amnesiac. No, of course I remember.”

“That’s the last time I went,” said Eskel. He drove on through the hills that rose up out of town, winding along the curve of a wooded ridge. He still didn't look Lambert's way, didn't smile. “I think. I’m old and senile.”

“I went with Aiden,” said Lambert, feeling out the name like a heavy, dark thing. _Aiden_. “Few months before he got caught. His buddy had taught him how to hack the computer system and rig the score. Name might still be on some record board somewhere. Got kicked for life.”

 _For life._ No one could have known that that life would add up to only a handful of free months and then a long span of years in a cell. Though maybe folks could have guessed, the way Aiden was. The things they thought about him. Maybe it was only Lambert taken by surprise.

Closing his eyes against the blur of wooded landscape, Lambert could see him in the neon, flickering dark of the bowling alley, hunched over the blue haze of a monitor, blowing shaggy hair out of his grin as he waggled his eyebrows. _We’re in, sweetheart_ he’d said in exaggerated baritone, standing stiff and proper with bowling bowl cradled in the crook of his arms, stalking across the sticky floor and letting it sail free in a dramatic release, limbs askew, to knock out a pin or two that the computer read in blinking red as a strike.

The Aiden in his memory turned from the lane and bowed low with a flourish, looking fucking ridiculous, having to stop his excessive curstying to grab at the sag of his baggy pants and tripping over his feet on the way back to their table.

The memory went slippery then, unstable.

Had Aiden slumped back into a chair and beckoned him on, face lost to shadow except when the disco ball pulsed out over his body, catching the smolder of his black eyes? Had he slipped back to sit daringly astride Lambert’s thighs, the bowling alley chair creaking under the shared weight, mouth hot and dry against his throat?

No, no, that been a dream, a fantasy, pulling in through the cracks afterward. Sucking into the vacuum of things they never got around to. Maybe-somedays filtering into the fragile realm of memory and percolating.

Lambert opened his eyes.

“Shit,” Eskel was saying. “Sorry, man, I didn’t think--”

“Quit apologizing,” he said. “You don’t have to tiptoe around it like I’m gonna cry myself to sleep if I remember that he’s gone. It’s a fuckin’ small town. We all have memories everywhere.”

“Right,” said Eskel. “Excuse me for forgetting that nothing’s ever fucking hurt you. You’re untouchable.”

His words harsh and confusing. Swallowed by the radio dial twitched to a swelling volume.

The truck turned onto the road that led toward the farm, past scant copses of pine windbreaks and flickering cornfields. Tires hissing over gravel as they met the drive.

The afternoon had started to tip bit by bit into evening, shadows stretching in long fingers across the grit of the road and the swell of ditches on either side. Up at the farmhouse along the ridge, Vesemir’s truck was absent, still out doing whatever it was decrepit old bastards did these days while leaving all the hard work to somebody else.

Eskel swiveled the nose of his truck toward the trailer to a chorus of baying dogs, parking and heading out toward the garage without asking for Lambert to follow. He did anyway, hands shoved in his pockets, scuffing his heels in the grass. He watched Eskel’s shoulders round as he bent low to scoop dog food from the bin in practiced movements, filling each bowl and carrying an impractical number in each big hand to shove through the hatches of the kennels.

Lambert didn’t know how to feel out the strange pocket of silence that had enveloped them, didn’t know how to un-say words spoken in anger. He stood by to watch, feeling ineffective and useless.

“Listen, Eskel, I’m--” _I’m the fuck-up, ok? I ruin pretty much anything that sticks around long enough._

“Could make yourself useful and bring in the groceries,” said Eskel, not turning around.

Lambert fled back across the yard to the truck. He brought in all the bags in one load, plastic straining over his bent arms and kicked open the screendoor, depositing it all haphazard on the porch futon to open the front door. He didn’t know where anything went, Eskel’s kitchen narrow and dimly-lit, so he fumbled everything out onto the counter. Grabbed at a bottle of whiskey, cracked the seal of the cap and chugged.

 _Shit_. He pressed the lukewarm bottle to his pinched forehead and slumped, sliding down the kitchen cabinets, door handles and ridges knuckling down his spine, until his ass hit the floor. There, he waited on Eskel. _Shit. Shit, you’re gonna lose him too._

He was dizzy, the whiskey hot on his tongue, by the time Eskel slapped in through the screen door and stepped into the kitchen, yanking off his boots and chucking them somewhere. He flicked the lights on, shrinking the grey shadows back to the corners of the room, and didn’t say anything about Lambert huddled down on the linoleum, Eskel's facial expression the same flat nothing that it had been all afternoon.

Fished a gallon of milk out of the fridge and selected a sugary cereal from the mess of groceries. Clacked down two bowls beside one another on the little dining room table. Gestured for Lambert to duck so he could extract spoons from the drawer over his head.

“Dinner,” he said, blank and lacking inflection.

Then stopped and let out a long breath, his broad shoulders giving to it. Eskel shuffled back into the kitchen and offered out his hand. Lambert pressed the bottle of whiskey into it, curved into the meat of his rough palm, and Eskel took it, pulled a swig from it, set it aside.

“Come here, idiot,” he said, dropping his arm toward him again, palm upright and fingers loose. A clear request for something.

Lambert had fuck all left to give.

He let his hand fit into his old buddy’s anyway, let himself be tugged up and enveloped. He didn’t fight the tightening of the embrace, Eskel’s arms around his waist, his face in the crook of Lambert’s neck. He surrendered to it, swallowed in the bastard’s cheap aftershave, fingers curling without thought into the worn fabric at the back of his shirt.

 _Shit_ , thought Lambert, unmoored, trying not to let his composure fracture the same way everything else did and failing, failing, caught in the vice of Eskel’s arms as he started shivering apart piece by piece.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one day i'll write about cows. up next: it gets horny. :O


	7. where the cool grass grows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warning for** eskel is definitely an alcoholic, drinking happens, some horny thoughts

Bottle shoved back and forth across the rippled surface of his dining table, the whiskey went down easy, smooth and expensive shit. Any other night he’d want to savor it maybe or talk himself into pretending like he was savoring it. Grill up a porterhouse standing out in the yard, dogs whining at his feet. Pour himself a few fingers in a glass like he wasn’t going to steady on drain the bottle.

Eskel didn’t even feel drunk much anymore, everything going a little glassy and blurry but rarely tipping into the warm and slippery buzz of pleasant tipsiness. Only really felt the drink when sobriety had settled again.

Lambert wrinkled his nose over the burn of the whiskey every time, features all pinched and tongue sticking out in a dramatic gag. The drunker he got, the more pink crept up his collar, sharp nose and cheekbones ruddy, and the less he remembered Eskel’s quiet and the tension of the afternoon.

“Damn, Esk,” slurred Lambert, fingers white around the neck of the bottle, hunched forward into his empty bowl of cereal. He squinted at the liquid sloshing against the glass, about half full. “You really are an alcoholic.”

“Told you,” said Eskel with a laugh, gesturing for the whiskey. Lambert pressed the bottle upright and gave it a shove, sailing into Eskel’s open palm. “Why I said not to buy the expensive shit.”

“I’m regretting it, man,” said Lambert as Eskel took a long swig, the lip of the bottle warmed where their mouths have pressed and cool elsewhere and set the whiskey back down within Lambert’s reach. “Turns out I am not a man of expensive taste. Give me some bottom shelf shit. Tastes less like ass.”

He tipped the whiskey bottle up to drain a little swig, wincing, and ducked in for a longer draw. A spill of liquid escaped the corner of his lips and caught in the line of his stubble, and Lambert smacked at it with the back of his hand, feigning a death rattle.

Stupid to be charmed by his stupidity, but it was easy to sink back into the feeling of old camaraderie. Like the whiskey, going down supple and warmed by their lips and hands. Harder to feel the hurt when he was liquored up.

“You know what ass tastes like, Lambo?”

“Sure thing, pardner,” said Lambert and cackled, bent forward with the grip of his laughter until his chin thunked against the edge of the table. He dangled the whiskey bottle in his loose fingers, turned his face against the surface like he was examining the grain.

Lambert slapped a hand against Eskel’s knee under the table as though to hold himself steady, thumb catching on the wrinkled seam in the denim shorts that ended in a tattered hem along the swell of his kneecap. His fingers traced along it in a mindless sort of stroke, curling absently up under the hem and wiggling.

He’d always been a touchy drunk, slipping into little deniable shifts of affection. Maybe just a latent tactile urge driving him. He pet the hollow at the back of Eskel’s knee, his fingertips rubbing at the tendons there and whispering over the vulnerable skin between, barely wisped with hair.

Eskel let him touch, though it veered just this side of ticklish. Least he could do. Held himself still so as not to spook him. If this was the only comfort Lambert would ever let himself take, the only apology he’d give Eskel, then so be it.

The little scrape of fingernails against a puckered scar. The rough of a callous on the dimpled skin of his thigh, creeping farther under the seam of his shorts, spreading a palm wide maybe just to feel the seep of heat, just to touch.

It was intimate.

Eskel feeling too sober and knowing he was shit-faced. Might wake blearily in the night and press his head under the running bathroom sink and mouth at the tap like an animal at a water trough. Might feel it tomorrow. Might do something stupid right now if Lambert kept looking at him like that, red curls spread across the table and cheek smushed and gaze tipped up, freckled brow furrowed, flushed all the way down the back of his neck. Too many details and all of it adding up to something stupid the night could easily veer toward.

Their eyes held for a long moment, breathing in the quiet of the room, heavy, like Eskel could feel the moisture condensing in the air, like they’d wake with it fogging the window panes.

Then, Lambert’s eyes fluttered shut, and his fingers dropped from their wandering along the skin of Eskel’s leg.

“Don’t drop the booze, kid,” said Eskel.

“Maybe I should cut you off,” he mumbled.

“Speak for yourself. You gonna pass out?”

“Uh-uhh,” Lambert grunted, drooling. His red eyelashes quivered over the dark line of his eye sockets. Exhausted. Eskel plucked the slipping bottle from his hand and set it aside.

“Bed time,” he said, nudging with his knees until Lambert relented and shuffled out the front door.

Eskel stumbled out into the blue dark to piss in the yard, watching an orange moon skirt along the crown of the bur oak near the garage. A cricket buzzed in a nearby cinderblock pile, and well in the distance, echoed the chittering calls of coyotes.

He didn’t feel drunk, besides a swell of vertigo when he closed his eyes, the ground tipping this way and that. He didn’t feel sober, besides the seeping clench of what he distantly realized was hot arousal.

Hadn’t been touched like that in a while. Hadn’t wanted anyone to, hadn’t let anyone. Hadn’t thought about Lambert like that in a long time, like he wanted to reach out and hold his head up, hand cupped under the line of his jaw and slick a thumb along his bottom lip, slip it in, hooking the swell of his cheek and letting him suckle like a--

Eskel turned back toward the trailer, feeling his heartbeat in his cheeks. String lights ringed the screened-in porch in a wonky halo, rising up out of the black all around. Lambert had tucked himself in on the futon already but wasn’t sleeping, a quilt bunched over his shoulders, his open laptop glowing white across the pull of his frown.

His expression defaulted to that distracted frowning, _resting asshole face_ they used to say, said he spent too much time as a kid pissed off and it stuck like that. Used to say a lot of shit about Lambert, a whole lot of shit that Eskel never thought was deserved. Damn, he had a right to be pissed off, raised the way he was. Learned to be wary and strung tight, waiting for the next blow to fall. Learned to couch his anxiety with barbed words, to hide his fumbled affection under the cover of drunkenness.

He wondered, standing with the grass tickling the bare tops of his feet, how far it would go if Eskel followed that affection down. If he leaned back into Lambert’s touch, strode onto the porch and fell onto the futon and hitched his too-big body against the younger man’s, letting the both of them pretend at just being tipsy and horny.

Would Lambert blink in confusion and hiss and snarl and shove him bodily away or would he melt into it, shivering, and allow the stroke of Eskel’s hands down his live-wire spine, let himself be cocooned a while in the milky haze of somebody giving a shit about him?

Because Eskel did. Give a shit about him. Didn’t know how to handle grief or regret, didn’t know how to parse it except by trying to shove it deeper until it drowned, but he gave a shit about Lambert, he gave a shit. He'd let Lambert bite him and insult him if it helped. Let him touch him if it helped, fuck him if it helped.

Anything. _Anything_. He wanted to pick Lambert up and shake him until the years of hurt fell away. He wanted to fit both palms around the back of his head, tangled in his messy curls, and just grit his teeth and hang on until maybe he felt even an inkling of the desperation Eskel felt.

 _Don’t you leave me too,_ he’d project through his hands, telepathic, trembling. _I’ve fucked my whole life and got so few things left. Don’t fucking go anywhere, brother. Please be ok at the end of all this. Please come out clean._

Fuck. Eskel needed to quit drinking.

He pressed back through the screendoor, let it slam. Lambert looked up from his computer screen, squinting, grooves wrinkling around the corners of his eyes and mouth. He looked old. Tired. Pissed off too long and his face stuck like that. Too much heavy shit weighing him down.

Eskel was too drunk for this.

“You and him… you and Aiden,” he said, his mouth running away from him. “Were you? I mean. Everyone always said… you know.”

“Yeah,” said Lambert, frown lifting away to a bitter smile. “Everyone sure always had something to say.”

“I know,” said Eskel. “But you were…”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, we were.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don’t be. I was fucking stupid to think-- don't know.”

Eskel didn’t say anything, didn’t voice any of the desperate, rattling blur of emotion he’d been struck by in the yard. 

“You’ll be ok,” he whispered, like a prayer, like a plea.

Lambert’s cheeks hollowed in the glare of the laptop screen. Something like a corpse, grey-eyed, blue-lipped.

“Night, Eskel,” he said.

“Night,” said Eskel and turned his body away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sometimes u just gotta write lambert fingering eskel's jorts for no good reason
> 
> chapter title is from.... well guess what happens next chapter


	8. down by the river in the full moonlight

Lambert tried his best to sleep.

Usually even a little booze crept up behind him and knocked his skull half out of his body, leaving him unwilling to stir until at least midday. But something about the cool air gently rolling through the windchimes along the eaves, the settling sounds of the farmland and midnight wildlife around him, kept him wired and distracted.

His pillow seared too hot against his cheek and then too cold when he flipped it. His toes poked through the holes in the afghan each time he tugged it around his shoulders. He scrolled through his usual Facebook groups, ones for guns and bikes and cat memes and couldn’t find a single thread worth trolling or commenting on, everything blurring into the same old shit.

When he pulled up Aiden’s name, his account looked the same as it always had. Paused at seventeen. His profile picture was a full body shot of him, lanky and shaggy-haired, holding a big ass trout he’d caught out near the dam.

It had been early spring, the banks of the river muddied and grass swept with cowlicks from the winter floods. Aiden balanced up on the concrete abutment that hemmed the back of the spillway, casting a whistling line out over the water. Lambert never had the same patience for fishing or hunting that the other guys did, getting itchy just sitting there casting and reeling, casting and reeling while the day cracked open and leaked from dawn into morning.

But Aiden didn’t mind that Lambert quickly tossed aside his own rod to skip rocks, hunting for the perfect flatness and bevel, cursing when he curved his wrist too much and the stone plonked to the depths rather than spitting across the river. Aiden didn’t mind the whooping when Lambert finally managed to send one sailing out all the way across, hopping in neat little arcs, to land with a little thump in the mud on the opposite bank.

Despite the distraction and the noise, he managed to reel in the trout anyway, its pink gills flexing desperately against his browned knuckles, the wet mouth open like a prayer to whatever god brook trout prayed to. 

In the photo, the fish looked small and limp. Backlit by the rising sun, Aiden burned too brightly, eyes vanished in shadow, bent arms still. Would Lambert forget one day that how the trout had flexed its scales and sinew in his hold, gasping its silent pleas into the crook of Aiden’s fingers? 

Prayers answered, the fish returned to the water, hook tugged with careful precision from the white cartilage of its throat.

Would he forget the breathless touch of Aiden’s mouth, the smell of clean water crashing into spray off the ridge of the dam, the heat of the sun looming up beyond the treeline?

Aiden had laughed, rattling a can of spray paint and hung his body off the lip of the abutment, Lambert clinging to his shoulders. If he fell, he’d crash into knee deep water, maybe scrape himself on the rough concrete of the spillway, but childhood warnings made the act hum with danger. 

_Want to leave our names somewhere completely impractical,_ said Aiden, holding himself over the edge, Lambert’s heels digging into grit to keep him steady. He didn’t even see what Aiden had graffitied until later, driving down the road on the opposite side that wrinkled down out of the hills and along the muddy river. Aiden hadn’t circled it with a heart like he’d threatened, but it was suitably juvenile, a bubble letter, cartoons _A & L_ drawn with an artistic sweep of the wrist, the ampersand blurring between their initials.

Should have carved it into a tree or a schooldesk or a rifle stock. 

When the flood rose up high a few years later, the letters wore off and cracked.

Lambert couldn’t sleep.

Aiden’s Facebook page was empty, had been for years, had never posted much. Most recent post a distant video of fireworks. Blue-black and little plumes of sparks. Lambert had watched it a dozen times just for the exaggerated oohing and ahhing Aiden did in the meanwhile, giggling, snorting. Tucked on Eskel’s futon, he didn’t turn on the sound, just watched the grainy explosions and felt like he might burst into light and smoke himself.

Fuck it. Lambert leapt from the futon, casting off the blankets and standing there barefoot on the porch, rocking back on his heels, surprised to find himself mostly sobered up.

He knew where Eskel kept the fishing rods, nestled in the hall closet among winter coats and rain jackets, tackle box shoved on a musty shelf above. Fumbling in the dark, he dragged out the gear and piled it against the wall, making enough noise that Eskel must be awake by now. Before he could think too much about it, he paced down the hallway to the cracked door of Eskel’s bedroom and pressed inside.

Eyes adjusting to the blackness, he saw Eskel as a charcoal-grey shape in the bed, cocooned in blankets. Time for hesitation long gone, he made a spry leap and landed on his feet on the mattress, attempting not to trod on any hidden limbs and not quite succeeding.

“Wake up, Esk,” Lambert said, not even trying for a whisper. “Let’s go fishing.”

Eskel groaned and shifted to his belly, slapping at Lambert’s naked shins.

“The fuck,” he slurred, fingers curling to feel out the bones in his ankle. Lambert stood above him, minding the ceiling fan, and stepped up to wiggle his toes against the back of Eskel’s sleep-warmed shirt.

“Wake up or I squish you like a bug,” he said, nudging the meat of his shoulder threateningly.

A flash of light illuminated the bed as Eskel squinted to check the time on his phone. 

“Lambert, it’s the middle of the the fuckin’ night.”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Got a whole flock of sheep out there,” Eskel mumbled. “Go count them.”

“Come on, when’s the last time you went fishing?”

“Oh, I dunno, sometime when it wasn’t fucking 3AM.”

“Eskel,” whined Lambert and knew he sounded like somebody leaning toward off his rocker. Maybe all the way gone already. Nothing but restless energy. Snapped.

The spine beneath his heel dipped low with a sigh.

“Let me up, you idiot,” Eskel said without any heat, and Lambert relented, removing his foot from his back. He rolled over and blinked up at Lambert standing above him, the white glow of his phone screen seeming to blind him more than illuminate. “You’re a fucking nutcase.”

“I’m allowed to be a nutcase,” said Lambert. “I’m grieving or whatever.”

A low blow, pretending like this was any kind of attempt at catharsis. He didn’t want to talk about his feelings or mourn or do anything symbolic like cast a little effigy into the water or light a paper boat and watch the flames sink. He didn’t want to mourn Aiden at all. 

He didn’t want to have to.

Eskel stretched, his spine popping audibly, and rubbed at his forehead as he shoved himself up. He looked pinched with exhaustion and softened at the edges, something pleasing about the tousled bird’s nest of his hair and loose stretch of his collar.

It reminded Lambert, suddenly, that if he was a complete fucking idiot, he could always burn out all this energy a simpler way, with an aggressive fuck or two. A bodily release for the tension that had clawed its way under his ribs and caught there. Like somebody thumbing out the barb of a hook. Easy as that.

He knew Eskel wouldn’t say no. Being a hair from fucking losing it gave him an edge over the man beneath him. Somehow, Eskel gave a shit. Didn’t want to see him hurting.

Lambert knew if he pushed, Eskel wouldn’t push back. 

Benefits of having a dead friend. Unlikely that his propositions would be turned down, no matter how lunatic or haywire or likely to end horribly for everyone involved.

It blind-sided him, the things he wanted. 

He wanted to stoop down and taste the downward bow of Eskel’s bottom lip. He’d wanted to for a long time in that distant sort of way that anybody thought those kinds of things about their friends. Or maybe not. Maybe other guys didn't think those sorts of things about their old buddies, but they'd always been different, the whole lot of them. He knew Eskel wasn’t straight, because none of them had kept any secrets back then, trading adolescent fears and desires with the juvenile surety that they’d stay friends through any revelation, never wavering. He’d maybe always wanted to kiss him, even at thirteen lying belly down in the hayloft of the old cow barn and whispering boyhood secrets. Eskel knew Lambert was gay, had known since the moment Lambert did.

Eskel knew him, worried for him, wanted him to be alright. 

He knew Eskel wouldn’t say no.

Lambert was maybe still a little drunk.

Thank fuck he hadn’t yet lost all his sense, because instead of grabbing at Eskel’s collar and falling into to the heat of his lap and losing his breath in the swell of a hard kiss and forgetting the risk of fucking his last real friendship up irreparably, he kicked Eskel in the thigh and leaped out of the bed again.

“Come on, come on,” Lambert called as he slipped back down the hall, hearing Eskel lumber up behind him. He almost tripped over the discarded fishing gear and scooped up the lot without slowing down, whacking the rods off the walls and doorframes as he stumbled out and off the porch into the summer night, a round moon above skimmed with clouds. He kept on going and didn’t stop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can and will make fish facebook profile pictures a little bit erotic
> 
> next time: baaaaby get readyyyyyyyyyyyy ooohH OOHH


	9. cool ourselves from the heat of the night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i realized after last chapter that possibly the stupid references to [fishing in the dark](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=201k02yBgS4) are being lost on folks and now i feel very sad for today's Youths

Eskel dreamed.

The sort of dreams both vivid with detail and blurred to hell, and in them, he was a boy again, shrinking back into the slight body of his youth. _There’s a critter in the chicken coop,_ someone in the dream slurred, _go on out and get it._ Pressed the cold length of a rifle into his hand as he scrambled out of the farmhouse. He felt more than saw his brother behind him, quickened breath and a warm body. 

Beneath the shape of the coop something squealed and howled and scratched while the chickens clucked out alarm calls. Hearing the boys coming down from the house, it vanished, leaving only a white smattering of hen feathers, sprayed out like an implosion. 

The dream shifting, Eskel ran barefoot under a yellow moon held in the branches of the bur oak by the drive. He drove his knees into the sod that cradled its roots. A shelter, a quiet place to rest a while. 

Lambert waited there for him, looking like he had in the hospital parking lot, back rounded down against his upturned knees. When Eskel reached for him, he slumped and touched the hem of his shorts, sliding a flat palm up his bare thigh. The touch burned. Eskel cupped the hinge of his tense jaw in both hands and tipped his face up to look. He wanted to see him.

He was handsome in a familiar way, rough-edged and weathered in the way of farm boys. Eskel kissed him on the wrinkled ridge of his brow as Lambert’s hands spread low on the paunch of his belly. Burning. Branding.

“Wake up, Esk,” Lambert said. “Let’s go fishing.”

Eskel groaned into confused wakefulness, rolling to find a Lambert no longer slippery with dreams perched above him and seemingly intent on stomping on him until he roused himself.

He’d sobered up enough to feel out the shape of his earlier drunkenness. Embarrassing. Would have to pay Lambert back for most of that bottle of whiskey. He didn’t find the idea of going fishing in the wee hours of the morning particularly appealing, but Lambert wiggled his toes threateningly against his spine as the details of his dream blurred into the desperate, drunken things he’d thought earlier in the yard. 

He needed Lambert to be ok. He’d do most anything, as it turned out. 

He’d drag his aching body up at 3AM to suit some ridiculous whim, sure, alright. Lambert’s eyes looked more than a bit crazy, his voice tight, moving faster than Eskel could manage as he rose from bed to follow him. 

If he was going to spin out tonight, Eskel had to be there to catch him. Simple as that.

The night air was cool and alive with cicadas, the grass not yet swept with dew. Enough moonlight to see clear as greyscale, the shine of it brimming in Lambert’s hair. The younger man stooped here and there to root out bait from soft patches of ground. Eskel knew where they were headed, following the line of the drive down toward the pasture where they’d put the cows up the day before. The willow-lined crick was good fishing, though he’d prefer it on a lazy afternoon sprawled in a warm swathe of grass, half-dozing as his line bobbed. 

He stretched out the twinge of his bum knee as Lambert slipped easily through the gaps in the barred pasture gate. Scrawny bastard. Eskel wouldn’t have fit through that even as a kid.

“Come on, Esk,” called Lambert, “where’s your enthusiasm?”

“Back in bed,” he said but hitched his heavy body over the gate and fell in step behind Lambert. “What’s the rush? I think we’ve got about ten hours until the sun comes up, buddy.”

“Shut up. You were the one who used to wake me up and make me do this.”

“Long time ago.”

“Old man.”

“Back in my day, we waited until we could see our own dicks to piss before we went out fishing.”

“Moon’s bright enough,” said Lambert as they came up on the banks of the creek, a rippling pool of water dammed up where the creek turned back on itself. For emphasis, he hooked his thumbs in his waistband and presented Eskel with the pasty-white of his asscheeks. 

“You’ve blinded me now, thanks,” said Eskel. “Put your pants back on before the mosquitoes chew you to hell.”

Instead, Lambert dropped his shorts entirely and tugged off his tank top, hooking them over the crook of a draping branch so as not to lose them in the dark. Despite himself, Eskel looked, willing his breath not to hitch. His whole body was the same wiry muscle he’d always been, bunching through the taut line of his shoulders, narrow hips and knobby knees. Pale as a fuckin’ sheet. He looked like he’d be cold as stone to the touch, but Eskel knew the heat of him, knew he’d burn the skin of his palms.

Lambert walked down into the crick, the water swallowing him shin to thigh. The pool was only waist-deep but good enough for floating.

“You coming?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Thought we planned on fishing,” said Eskel. 

“Maybe later,” he said, a muted quality to his voice.

“Your scrawny ass’ll scare off all the fish.”

“Come here, Eskel,” said Lambert, leaning back in the water and letting it buoy his shoulders.

Couldn’t do anything but give to that quiet note in the shape of his name. He’d do most anything.

Eskel made quick work of shucking out of his clothes, standing there a moment trying not to feel self-conscious. He’d packed on weight the past few years, had always been big but never chubby. Used to be spry and toned despite his size, now all soft bigness. Too much beer and lazing around feeling sorry for himself. Too many gas station donuts and takeout nights.

Swallowed to the neck by the creek, Lambert wasn't shy about watching him, waiting.

He toed the water and found it warm enough, the cool of the night giving it more heat. Even so, it wouldn’t be exactly comfortable creeping up his thighs. 

Took a breath and swallowed his hesitation, letting out a whoop as he charged in, breaking the glassy surface with a wave of water that nearly swamped over Lambert’s head.

“Asshole!” Lambert laughed, sputtering, and Eskel caught him in a headlock, knees bent to stay low in the water and toes squishing into the silty bottom. Lambert’s fingers scrabbled against his arm, but the feeble protest was no use as Eskel rolled and dunked him under.

He came up coughing, wiggling his way out of Eskel’s hold, hair flattened over his face.

“That’s for wakin’ me up at three in the morning,” said Eskel, pounding him on the back as he coughed.

“Jeez, Esk, think I’m dying.”

“You inhale a crawdad?”

“Hope a guppy swims up your--”

“Hey, hey, quit hollerin’. You’ll wake up half the countryside.”

“That’s my luck. The old man will come down with his gun and take me for a trespasser.”

“Coyote’s more likely,” said Eskel. His hand had found its way to cup the back of Lambert’s neck, slippery with wet hair. “You sure look scraggly enough to be one.”

“Sorry I’m not pretty enough for you, Esk,” said Lambert, shaking out his hair like a dog, droplets flying. Eskel ducked his head to avoid being smacked with the damp strands, a swirl of current sucking at his bent legs as he crouched in the water.

“Not so pretty myself,” said Eskel, and Lambert grinned, crooked and cheeky.

“Yeah.”

“Damn, mean as a coyote too.”

Joking, Lambert bared his teeth like he aimed to snap them. Like he would sting the little points of his canines against the skin of Eskel’s throat. 

It dizzied him, the truth of it. He’d let him. He’d want him to.

His thumb caught in the tendon along Lambert’s neck and stroked. The moonlight that touched the swaying boughs of the willow trees rippling over the water gave everything a blurry quality. Same as a dream.

“Hey,” said Lambert, almost a whisper. The wet hair plastered against his forehead and neck made his ears stick out, made him look goofy and pathetic.

“Hey,” said Eskel, feeling the drip from his own wet bangs, droplets itching along the ridges of his scarred cheek. He startled when Lambert’s fingers spread over the puckered skin, cooled by the water.

This was stupid, whatever it was. 

Beneath the surface, he could feel the heat of Lambert’s body, his crouched knees nudging against his belly. Wanted him closer, wanted anything he wanted.

Stupid. 

The water made the movement easy, bodies weightless, Eskel’s legs parting as his hand touched Lambert’s hip bone and pulled him into the crook of his lap. It was easy, Lambert rising above him, both hands planted on his chest and mouth open. Easy, the wet touch of their lips, the in-drawn breaths. 

The kiss was slow and quiet, an ache blooming up in his chest. 

Didn't last longer than a heartbeat. They parted just far enough to look at each other.

Eskel held himself still like Lambert really was a wild animal that would spook if he wasn’t careful. Nothing about this was careful.

So stupid.

Lambert, wild-eyed and trembling, pressed Eskel's shoulders down under the water when he tried to lean up to meet his lips again.

“Shit,” breathed Lambert, voice breaking.

“Yeah.” Eskel’s stomach clenched, his body feeling big and clumsy, his head a dizzy rush. “Shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter: these two continue to be big stupid idiot rednecks


	10. and the rope by the river hung silently

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warning** for vague references to suicidal ideation and domestic abuse
> 
> chapter title is a lyric from wasted time by keith urban lol

Dawn broke in a wash of paleness over the horizon that spread into tongues of gold, catching on the wavering filaments of their cast fishing lines. They sat near each other on the packed earth beneath the willows but did not touch, did not speak.

Not a single fish biting and the flies waking up as the mosquitoes tucked themselves into bed.

Lambert fucking hated fishing.

He’d long given up on castling and re-casting and settled into the heavy silence, rod pinned between his knees, head tipped back against rough bark to look up into the branches.

As boys, they’d all been into some fantasy series where the heroes carried around willow bark to ward off pains, and it had been with great and solemn ceremony that a skinned knee meant a sliver cut from the bent crook of a tree, the flavor woody and bitter, mouth full of flaked splinters.

Had it ever had much effect in dulling the pain? To chew a wedge of bark a moment and spit it out onto the grass? Had the pain ever been great enough to need dulling? Not the little scrapes and dings and bruises picked up from rabblerousing about the farm, and the bigger hurts sank too deep to touch.

Like the difference in this crick and its pool you had to crouch to swim in and the river it drained into miles downstream. The contrast between these shy willows with their branches nudging the crook of the water and the sturdy maples and beeches that crowded the river’s edge. One of those big, leaning maples must still have a wonky ladder of flat boards nailed to its weathered trunk and a thick rope dangling like a noose down over the water.

It had felt like some pinnacle of manhood, jeered on by the older boys below as his bare toes wriggled against the notches of the nailed boards. When he’d climbed as high as the ladder went, the bank shrinking away from him, the brown surface of the river lapped with flickers of light, somebody tossed up the rope, and he lurched to snag it in his fingers. Hesitated.

High enough up that willow bark wouldn’t cut it if a swing went badly but not so high that one of the others couldn’t reach up and touch the river-dark skin of his heel. It had been Eskel, weird and small viewed from above, still rail-skinny while hormones burned him up, grinning like he was truly fond of scraping his fingernail along the caked dirt in the groove of Lambert’s ankle.

“Go on, pissbaby,” Eskel had said. “You gonna go or should I climb up there and push you out?”

Lambert went, his belly falling straight out of his body as the rope caught and pitched down, down and then toward the sky. Timed his release, breathed, and loosened himself, meeting the water with a crack of surface tension that stung like a full body stubbed toe.

The other boys had laughed and laughed in the literal wake of his stupendous belly flop, and he’d flailed groaning in the current until Coen swam out and hitched him up on his shoulders only to toss him off the deeper dropoff, the both of them yowling and trying at dunking one another.

Years later, Aiden had told him how to jump without busting your whole body to hell, explaining it once on the bank and again as they clung to the underside of the railroad bridge, flaking rust grinding under Lambert’s heels, his elbows hooked behind him in the crossed supports of the old structure.

He stared down at the flat gleam of the river below, as smooth as a concrete surface and just as unyielding to a body dropped from a height. Punch through just right or the river would punch back, like leaping from a building onto a city street. But this road could drown you, swell up over your head while you lay stunned. He’d seen how quickly river rescues transitioned into body recovery, barely a few unsteady minutes before they brought out the dredges and divers.

Aiden’s lips moved against the cut of his shoulder as he told Lambert how to fall.

“Why do it at all?” he’d asked. If it’s that fuckin’ easy to do it all wrong and splat like a cracked egg and drain away beneath the water, then why jump?

“Just because,” said Aiden and kissed him a little right at the jut of his shoulder. Lambert’s body always felt close to combusting when he did that. He wished he wouldn’t do it at all. He breathed in ragged anticipation, metal digging into his arms, knowing right when Aiden said to, he’d let go.

Yeah, yeah, he got the fatal irony. _And if your friend asked you to jump off a bridge, would you?_ shrieked by some caricature of a doting mother.

Not Lambert’s mother, that was for sure, who’d drink herself into numbness most nights. Somebody else’s mother, who’d yell and shake him for trying such a thing, who’d shout that it wasn’t all that funny actually, stop laughing, young man, stop that at once. Vesemir sure would have thought it was funny, not funny haha but funny in the head, but he’d never yell or shake him, too scared to be an echo of his shithead father, always treating Lambert like something glass-blown and ready to shatter.

“Now,” said Aiden, and he unhooked his arms to drop.

Lambert didn’t break to pieces beneath the railroad bridge, and he didn’t make the evening news.

He blinked open his eyes as the sky pinked up and thought about willow bark, about rope, about the black surface of the water.

The cattle that had been bedded down somewhere nearby through the night, hidden by the blackness, ambled down through the field to the water’s edge to drink. Their hooves sank into muck and spread blooms of silt out in the clear current, shooing off the last hope of fish. A pair of white-faced calves splashed together in a brief show of joy, headbutting and snorting.

By his brief reckoning, it was Wednesday morning. Only two days. 

“Got work tomorrow,” said Lambert without looking at Eskel sitting beside him, both reeling in their lines.

“Call off,” said Eskel. “You can stay another--”

“No,” he said.

Didn’t realize he’d hit the end of his line until the bobber caught and the hook swung, threatening to catch him.

This was all his fault. The silence and the unsteadiness. If he’d just been a little less chickenshit. If he hadn’t pushed Eskel away hoping he’d push back harder. If he hadn’t had the shit for brains idea to go out fishing in the first place, then maybe--

“Alright,” said Eskel, “I’ll drive you back to your place after breakfast.”

Lambert tried to dredge up something to say, gratitude, an apology, anything to level out how much it all meant to him. Eskel hadn’t had to do any of this. Lambert didn’t need any of this.

He would have gotten on. He’d done it his whole life.

He didn’t look at Eskel, watched the cattle’s black mouths dripping with water as they raised their heads and knew he’d never be able to express what he was really thinking, that maybe this time when he’d dropped off the edge he’d broken something. A break that wouldn’t ever knit together clean.

Wanted to say some trite shit like _it’s not you, Esk, it’s me, fuck, it’s me, it’s me._

Didn’t know how to say _thank you_ without making it a goodbye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha cows


	11. yeah, the dark days find a way

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warning** for Eskel's disability comes up and there's some internalized ableism and self-hatred and some teasing on Lambert's end that could be read as ableist. additionally, continued references to and worrying about suicidal ideation and a brief mention of the threat of psych institutionalization. 
> 
> Gonna clarify here real fast that this fic won't include any overt suicide attempts, drug use, or hospitalization but will escalate into risky behavior and greater worry about the possibility and fear of such in upcoming chapters.

Near full morning, they walked back together along the swell of the pasture, some of the calves tagging along for a beat before realizing they weren’t headed anywhere worth going. 

Eskel’s body sure didn’t thank him for the night spent sitting with his ass on hard-packed ground, spine against the rough of a tree trunk, his bum knee tightening to a limp as he stretched into the walk back. 

It sucked, hunching like an old man and testing out the pinch of scarred muscles like he would for the rest of his life. It sucked. 

It sucked worse knowing some part of Lambert blamed him for his own wreck, for the ways their lives had twisted in different ways. If Eskel hadn’t got drunk and wrecked his truck and half-died and torn everything to pieces, the whole crew would have stayed tried and true together. Maybe Lambert would have known Aiden only as the weirdo in his math class, never latched onto him so deeply. Maybe. 

Or maybe it would have happened just the same. Some other falling out. Inevitable settling. Couldn’t stay boys forever, had to have something blow up in their faces. It was a case of when, not if, and whether the shrapnel would catch some place that changed everything.

Eskel rubbed at the itch in his scarred cheek and flicked his tongue against the torn edges of lip. He’d never minded the scars, could forget about them easy enough living way out here alone. It wasn’t the scars on his face that gave him trouble. Wasn’t really the body shifted off-kilter either, managed well enough by lazing around and feeling bad for himself. 

No, his accident had scarred him somewhere deeper still than that. Scarred the whole of his life like the crater in the wake of a meteor. Like the charred snap of a lightning strike. 

It sucked.

Feeling out the edges of a wound that had never healed right, proud flesh and ooze. Trying to do something good for Lambert and failing, failing, same as he ever had, tripping up just when he thought maybe he’d got something right for once. 

He’d wanted to be good for him, hold some small piece of whatever he was carrying for a little while. Be a soft place to land. And instead he’d let some old, hot-blooded, brutish desires resurrect like some fumbling teenager, like he could kiss Lambert whole, like his touch was anything close to healing. Idiot. Fucking idiot.  


They came up on the gate, and Lambert wiggled his way through in a blink, slipping between the bars easy as butter and popping back up in a frizz of red curls. Eskel sighed, and gripped the top rail, gearing himself up to clamber over, feeling out how much it would hurt. He swiped the chained padlock to cup in his hands, gripped it, tried to remember the combination and couldn’t. 

Could call Vesemir and ask, but the mortification of that tightened across his ribs. Both in admitting the weakness so easily read as laziness and in getting caught out fooling around in the fields at night like a youngster.

Eskel wasn’t a boy anymore, but he felt like one. Charity case kept up on his granddad’s land. Sting of pity. Hollow sympathy. Poor Eskel all twisted up and chewed out, no degree, no future. Poor kid, never amounting to anything, but he’d done it to himself anyway. He’d done it and kept doing it, insides healed back together all wrong and nasty.

Part of him wanted Lambert to just leave him out here. Let him go back down and lie in the hollow of the creek. The cows nudging around him in their stupid, animal simplicity. 

“You good, Esk?” Lambert asked, the damn gate as good as a rift cracked through the ground between them. 

“Yeah, I’m--” His mouth warped down. He wasn’t fine. “Sorry, sorry. Damn leg’s asleep. I can’t--” 

“Take your time, old man,” said Lambert.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m just--”

Eskel cursed. His lungs weren’t working quite right. His leg blurring with pins and needles. The morning sun too warm on the back of his neck. 

It fucking sucked.

“Need me to get your walker?” asked Lambert. Below the cheeky sharpness was something Eskel didn’t want to listen for. Something soft. Something understanding. Something that would have sounded like pity on anyone else, but it was Lambert so he knew better. Knew Lambert understood it. “Call the paramedics? Get a gurney out here? Call the cemetery about the family plot?”

“Shut it, Lambo,” he said, gritting his teeth against a well of emotion, pretending it was physical, the ache of a twinged tendon instead of whatever this was.  


Lambert stepped up close against the line of the gate, metal digging into his sternum, his long-fingered hands curled beside Eskel’s.

“Hey,” he said, the softness in his voice so different in the light of day. “Hey Esk, look at me, I’m--”

“Fuck, Lambert, I’m sorry,” said Eskel, and his forehead dropped down against Lambert’s shoulder. The hollow of his neck smelled like his own floral shampoo. “Holy fucking hell, I’m--”

“What for?” Lambert asked. A hand touched the side of his head. 

“You know what for,” he muttered. “For what happened to you. For fucking it up. For fucking this up.” 

Fucking all of it up. This time together and otherwise. All of it.  


“Shit, Eskel. I didn’t mean-- shit.”

Such a way with words, the both of them. And how could any of it be put to words that wouldn’t cut, that wouldn’t fucking suck worse than it already did? They’d never done this shit, not as boys and not now. Nobody ever taught them or if they tried, nothing stuck. Nothing but survival, coasting through, clinging on tethers to a world that had moved past them.

“Sorry,” Eskel mumbled against Lambert’s shoulder, mortified to find himself blinking wet against the soft cotton of his sleep shirt. “Sorry about--”  _ Aiden, your fucked up life, their broken friendship, kissing you when you were vulnerable and wanting to do it again, God, wanting to do it again right now.  _ “-- all of it.”

Huffing out a breath, he grabbed the top rail and shoved himself up, ignoring the tightness pulled through his whole body as he did so. Weight almost overbalancing and tipping over, but otherwise, it was easier going than he’d thought it would be. Settling down on the other side with only some wincing when the impact jarred. More in his head than anything. Scarred all up in places he couldn’t see.

It fucking sucked.

“Gotta go feed the stock,” he said and almost reached for the back of Lambert’s neck to clasp it. 

Stopped himself just in time. 

Limped on alone up toward the garage.

* * *

“We kissed,” said Eskel, forehead against the ridge of his steering wheel. He’d driven halfway home from dropping Lambert off back at his place and had to stop to pull off and make the call.

“Who-- wha--?”

Geralt, her voice scratchy with sleep. Nearly noon, the lazy fuckin’ idiot. Bet she lazed around all day in a warm pile with her two lovers, braiding each other’s hair, feeding each other grapes.  


“I kissed him. Kinda just happened. Lambert.”

“Ew.”

“Real supportive, dickhead. I’m freaking out.”

“Why? You that bad of a kisser.”

“I’m serious, Geralt. I think I fucked it all up. I think I’m--”

“Eskel,” said Geralt over the line, grounding. “Don’t panic. You didn’t fuck it all up.”

“Sure, I didn’t,” he said, pressing his forehead into the wheel hard enough to leave a dent of swirled stitching. “Just dropped him off back at his place. But he’s not--  _ Shit _ , Geralt, I was his support system or whatever. I was supposed to be--  _ fuck _ .”

“You didn’t fuck anything up,” said Geralt, her voice low and steady. Listening to her, Eskel could almost believe it. God, how did Geralt become the well-adjusted one? Out of any of them, he’d never expected her to sort out her shit. "You don't have to hold it together all the time. Your shit matters too."  


Imagine that. Fucking hell, she sounded like a goddamn shrink. 

“I fuck most things up. Hell, I’m a living breathing fuck-up.”

“Shut it, you are not,” said Geralt. “Lambert’s an adult. He made choices too.”

“His head’s not on straight right now. And I went and-- I’m fucking-- Shit, Geralt, I can’t lose him too. I’m terrified he’s gonna--”

“You think he’s in danger?” Her voice changed. “There’s people that could help with that. Places he could go. I could find a number for you.”

“He’d never forgive me,” said Eskel. “Not even if I brought it up. And I don’t know-- Maybe he’ll be fine. I’m just-- fuck, Geralt, I’m just being dramatic.”

“You’re not.”

“Just want to keep him in one piece. Be there. Can’t stand seeing him all shook up and hurting like this. I was supposed to be there to help keep it together, like you said.  _ Fuck,  _ I’m an idiot. I hate it. I was supposed to be there.”

“Shit, man,” said Geralt. “You really do got it bad for him.”

Somewhere wherever his sister was, a familiar laugh rose over the line.

“Tell Yennefer it’s not that funny actually. Also that I don’t have anything bad for anyone.”

“You love him,” said Geralt.

Eskel did love Lambert, of course he did. He loved him messily and overflowing. Too much. Had always loved him, wanted the best for him. That didn’t have much to do with whatever this was. Attraction coiled into some desperate need for him to be alright, keep his head above water, keep going, keep breathing. 

And it wasn’t some noble thing. Some big-hearted gesture. Eskel wanted it to be him who did it, buoying Lambert up above the current. Possessive. Clutching at him. 

Fuck. He’d just end up dragging him down. Too heavy. Too much.

“Yeah, of course, I love him,” he said. “He’s family. He’s-- I don’t know. What the fuck do I do now?”

“You need me to come up? We’ll be there on Friday, but I can leave early.”

Shit. The memorial service. They’d been surprised there would be one at all, especially so soon, but Aiden still had some family up this way, people who used to know him well enough to want him sent off with a few words.  


“No, I’m ok,” said Eskel. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Ok,” said Geralt, her voice so fucking gentle. Like an echo of their Mama’s voice, whispered soft over a lullaby. Fondness gripped him like a vice. “See you soon.”

“Love you,” Eskel managed, the words tangling unfamiliar in his throat.

“Love you too, asshole,” she said in return, like it was easy.

None of it was easy, not even something as simple and solitary as a word.

It all fucking sucked.


	12. corn liquor tastes sweeter in this town

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warning** for Eskel's alcoholism and binge-drinking bender, self-loathing and feelings of failure, internalized ableism, also references to Geralt's past suicidal ideation/shit mental state and Eskel's fears for her, Eskel's in a dark place at the moment
> 
> Geralt and Yen show up in this chapter so reminder that this mess of a fic is technically a sequel lol they're both trans women and in a poly relationship with trans guy/genderqueer Jaskier

Things blurred a little, like they did every time Eskel drank too damn much. Memory moth-eaten and burned out. 

Mucked out the sheep barn, resting on the pitchfork a moment in the rustling silence of the flock, the morning dust motes spiraling down over their woolly coats. Pressed a hand against a plush rump just to see the imprint give around his fingers. Should need shorn before breeding season. Had to get a guy out.

A lamb blinked at him, all wet eyes and long lashes. She’d go off to a feed lot soon, live another few months growing big enough to slaughter. Didn’t have the space here for weaning. Didn’t have the space to keep them all. Didn’t really bother him, not really. He’d grown up with it, seeing calves through from the winter steam of their births to the autumn fly-heavy haze of loading them up into semis. 

The lamb tipped her little head up toward him, dark eyes, white lashes. 

“Sorry, little darlin’,” he said. When he dropped his hand to pat her, she spooked and shrank back to her mother. 

He didn’t know what the fuck he was doing out here, playing farmer on a dying farm. The ghosts of the big combines hanging in the empty bay of the garage. The starlings taking over the rafters, and the mice taking over the floor. 

He was soundly outnumbered on his little patch of ground. 

Most times, it was a comfort. The sheep pressing around his legs, the dogs whining and leaping outside the pen, the goddamn goat stealing bites of sheep food from the bunk. 

Eskel leaned on his pitchfork, aching in the twinge of his bum leg and burning through his bum shoulder. He dug a flask out of his breast pocket and tasted nothing but vapors. Didn’t feel drunk. Didn’t feel much of anything.

Surrounded on all sides by living, breathing things.

Completely fuck all alone.

* * *

Friday evening, Geralt’s truck rumbled up the drive and parked in snug beside Eskel’s. Lifted a few inches higher than his, just to piss him off. Always made him laugh, the thought of that big ass yeehaw truck careening down a city street. Where the fuck did she park that thing? Even funnier thinking about her driving down main street here with her tailgate cluttered up with all those hippie bumper stickers. 

Funnier still seeing the new additions flapping on twin posts off the bed, the pastel pink, blue, white on one side and the blistering bright rainbow on the other.

Eskel snorted. Those certainly hadn’t been his sister’s idea.

Or maybe they had been. Change had hit Geralt full force the past year, opening her up into somebody who knew her place in the world, had something to be proud of, had people who gave a shit.

He sprawled out boneless on the futon, trying to work up the energy to get himself up and look presentable. Might still be drunk from the morning when he’d finished off the last of the liquor or maybe not. Hadn’t tried getting up since, his body both numbed and achey, the plywood ceiling pretty boring to stare at for hours actually, but what else could he do?

Truck doors smacked closed, and Eskel closed his eyes. Raised a hand to wave.

“Hullo,” he called, hearing their approach across the gravel of the walk, the creak of the hinge on the screendoor, the tread of boots on the crooked porch. A hand touched the crown of his head and pressed into his greasy hair, scratching with long fingernails. 

He opened his eyes to a silhouette as strange as it was familiar. His sister had her grey hair braided along her temple, undercut freshly shorn, her expression pinched with her usual concerned frown. She dressed the same as she always had, denim and steel toes and plain t-shirt, but even for all the same old, same old, there was something different about her. Softer. A quiet sort of difference.

Yennefer stood at her shoulder, not an inch of space between their bodies. Looking as hauntingly beautiful as usual. Dark red lipstick and smoky eyes.

God, the pair of them. They looked all poster child lesbian couple. Butch Geralt with her drawl and dirty work pants, femme Yennefer in her black and white sundress.

“You two look good,” slurred Eskel, tipping his head back against the arm of the futon. “How you been?”

“You look like shit,” said Geralt and promptly twisted around to sit her ass on his chest.

“Oof,” said Eskel, slapping her half-hearted on the legs as she folded them onto his chest. “Get off, I’m under the weather. I’m an invalid. I’m dying.”

“How much did you drink today?”

“All.”

“Idiot. Stupid. I should have come up earlier.”

“Gee, what have you been eating?” Eskel wheezed under Geralt’s weight and flinched when Yennefer promptly flicked him.

“Nobody ever told you not to comment on a girl’s weight?”

“That don’t apply when she’s your sister,” he said, trying to hide a wince as the settling weight had the pain blooming again. “And a fatass. Geralt, my shoulder--”

She was off at once, sitting beside his bent legs instead.

“Sorry,” she said. “I forget. You have anything to take for that?”

“No,” he said, thinking of a dark living room, thinking of the white buzz of a hospital lobby. He’d had shit prescribed for when the pain reared up, yeah, but he’d flushed it all the other night, hating the little rattle of pills, hating his scarred muscles, hating most everything.

Yen flopped on the depressing beanbag chair in the corner, her fuzzy, bronzed legs tucked up to tangle with Geralt’s smooth, pale ones. Gee, weren’t they a sight, huh? This town wouldn’t have any clue what to do with the two of them. They’d said they wouldn’t make a fuss at the funeral, keep the focus on Aiden for Lambert’s sake, but seeing them now, he wasn’t sure that was possible. They made a fuss just going through the world together, weirdly in sync even where they clashed, the only thing missing was--

“Where’s your poet?” asked Eskel, honestly a little grateful for the lack of flamboyant sing-songing. Maybe it made him a little bit of an asshole, but of Geralt’s two partners, he much preferred Yen. 

“He’s got thesis work he’s been slacking on.”

“Ugh, can’t believe that little idiot’s going to have a PhD,” groaned Yennefer.

“He won’t if he doesn’t stop taking Animal Crossing breaks.”

“Excuse you, Animal Crossing breaks are an important part of becoming a doctor. I should know. I almost went to medical school,” said Yennefer with a sniff.

“You're gonna regret enabling him when he flunks out."

"What's the difference? He's a poet, not a brain surgeon. He'll be dead broke either way."

Eskel hadn't spent as much time as he meant to with Geralt the past few years, just holidays and long weekends, little glimpses collected here and there, and their weekly phone calls weren't enough to give him a full picture of how Geralt was doing. 

Used to be, he'd just assume the answer was  _ badly _ and try to make an educated guess at how bad. Did he need to drive down there and stay a few nights?

He'd done it more than once, heard something in his sister's voice that spurred him to drive flat out across the Midwest plain until he found Geralt curled in the hollow of her disgusting apartment, little dog lapping at her bruised eyes, waxy and yellowing around the edges like worn newspaper. Tinder. Ripe for a flame to catch.

He'd had a plan, one he'd been lucky never to have to enact, for if it was worse than that. Had the name of a crisis hotline in Geralt's city written on the front of his fridge. Call in the cavalry. Let Geralt hate him after but let her live, let her survive.

By the easy way she joked with Yennefer, leaning into her space, their knees bumping, eyes wrinkled with affection, Eskel knew this wasn't just survival. 

She’d made it somehow. Out of all of them. She was alive, and she was living.

Eskel’s chest clenched with a big swell of bittersweet gratitude for that, all mixed up with longing. Didn’t quite know if that was in the cards for him. Maybe he’d had his last chance when he was sixteen, driving out shit-faced under a yellow moon. Maybe he’d wholly snuffed out the potential of his body and mind and life, narrowing down to his tin-roof trailer and little, stupid dreams. 

Body didn’t work good enough to keep up the farm. Head didn’t work good enough to keep anyone who mattered. Geralt, careening out in a wider and wider orbit around him, crashing back less and less, looking like a different person every time. Less like someone who needed him every time.

And Lambert, ricocheting, big, fat risk that he’d never catch him again, that Eskel’s gravitational pull wasn’t enough to hold him steady, sailing on and on into the dark.

* * *

Vesemir demanded the lot of them come up for dinner at the farmhouse, rather than go out and bother the locals in their old haunts and dives, so Eskel rolled himself up and tried to get presentable, showering and brushing his teeth and the like. When he’d dressed himself in something marginally clean, he looked in the mirror and scowled, letting the scarring form rifts along his cheek. 

He envied Geralt and Yen their smooth foundation and powders and colorful eyelids. Geralt had told him how she'd been taught how to contour her cheekbones, hide stubble, smooth the ruggedness of her jaw. The makeup transformed her face just enough without being too obvious, something to hide her dark circles, lengthen her eyelashes, while Yennefer favored bright colors and sheens. 

Eskel squinted in the mirror, looking haggard and bruised and blue-veined. Needed a shave. He laughed, thinking about somebody trying to use cosmetics to paint away his flaws and smooth out his complexion. Fuck, you’d need a full face of clown makeup. He’d look like a painted pig.

Slicked his hair back and tucked it behind his ears, shaved off the week’s growth of scraggly beard and leaned his body weight on the sink. Shit, it was just dinner with the old man. Didn’t need this much pampering. Had nobody here to impress.

But fuck if it didn’t feel like it, limping up the drive beside his sister and her partner. Vesemir standing out on the front porch, arms crossed and waiting for them. 

It had been a long, long time since he and Geralt looked near identical and the past few years had only set out to make the difference even starker. Easier to see when they were side by side. 

They bumped shoulders as they walked, Geralt slowing her step to his ambling pace.

He knew the old man could see it. Same shrewd way he saw everything.

It fucking sucked. The burn of humiliation, the sure knowledge of his own failure.

Vesemir met them on the porch and opened his arms to hug Yen and Geralt in turn. That was new. The hugging. Another thing that the past few years had changed, Geralt’s transition loosening something in the old man, something he’d kept locked down since losing their Mama. Vesemir finally making moves to sell the farm and move on. All of them in flux somehow. 

All but Eskel, staying put. Hell, sliding backwards.  


“You look too much like her,” said the old man, grasping both of Geralt’s shoulders and shaking a little, grinning crooked under his bushy mustache. “Just like your Mama.”

Geralt went pink at the edges with their granddad’s affection, muttering something, holding tight to Yen’s hand. 

Then, Vesemir looked to Eskel and creaked open his big arms. 

He hesitated, startled by the offer. He lived in his granddad’s backyard, mooching off his land and filling his old garage with sheep shit. No reason to embrace him like he was coming home. 

But Vesemir did, shuffling forward when he didn’t move quick enough, enveloping him. The breath pushed out of Eskel’s lungs. They were of a height, shoulders the exact same breadth, easy to see their relation when snugged up close like this.

His granddad’s embrace smelled like tobacco and woodsmoke and the rosemary he’d been using for cooking. A boyhood kind of scent, tangled up in a hundred foggy memories.

Eskel tried to control his breathing and failed, shoulders hitching under the weight of quiet sobs. Fucking embarrassing. Shit.

Vesemir didn’t let go, clapping him on the back though the sudden bout of crying, not saying anything about it or cooing over him, just holding him on the cusp of the farmhouse porch with dusk coming on. 

“He’ll be ok,” said his granddad, whisper-close. “You’ll both be ok.”

Yeah, the old man was still as shrewd as he’d ever been.

The shame of it burned and didn’t stop.


	13. hit those gold streets on two wheels

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warning** for story-typical grief, mourning, character death, etc
> 
> chapter title is from [give heaven some hell](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNLPf8YhSc8) by hardy which is the song that half inspired this fic and where i drew eskel's description

It was not a funeral.

No body, no hymns, no maudlin speeches, just a small crowd gathered in the fellowship room of a bone-white church. Burnt coffee in a steel carafe and chewy cookies on greasy napkins. 

Lambert hadn’t expected anything grand or life-altering, but he’d had some ideas about how it would go. How he he’d stand up partway through some tired speech by a minister bemoaning the loss of such a good, upstanding young man and how he’d shout something like  _ you never fucking knew him at all, you assholes. You never fucking liked him. _

He’d imagined wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth, women in black veils hanging on one another, black umbrellas in a green swathe of cemetary, and Lambert in the middle of it all the singular person who had loved Aiden through even the ugliest times of all, steady and unflinching.

Instead, there was a little framed picture of a freckled teenager with shaggy hair. The thin rectangle of a sympathy card addressed to his family. A donation box for a charity he didn’t get close enough to recognize. Pockets of easy conversation and gaggles of children running here and there.

Couldn’t stand looking at that lopsided grin propped up in its simple frame on a flimsy church table. Couldn’t stand to look at all the people hunched before it to write their trite sentiments in looping script. 

_ Sorry that you’re dead, _ Lambert would write in boxy letters that swallowed the page, digging with the scratch of the pen like the ink was a blood-letting.  _ Sorry that this was all you got. That this was all we got. I’m sorry that you up and died on me. Sorry I didn’t try hard enough. Didn’t have more than what I am to give. Wasn’t enough. Couldn’t protect you and couldn’t fix you. _

He didn’t recognize many people and kept to the outskirts of the open room, feeling the heat threaten to burn a hole through his flimsy coffee cup, fingernails digging half moons into the styrofoam.

He saw Aiden’s mother, a short and busty woman wearing a peacock-patterned scarf. She’d been good enough to him the few times he had been around the house and touched his elbow and smiled sweetly when she greeted him. Aiden’s younger siblings didn’t seem to remember him, too young and distant from their reckless older brother. Other family from out of town clustered here and there, similar skin tones and loose curls. Some people who knew Aiden’s mother or siblings more than they’d ever known Aiden. 

No one here had known him.

None of them looking anything close to breaking down into tears, not even keeping a respectful funeral hush. Touching each other’s arms and laughing. Clustered in little groups and chatting about ordinary family news and business. 

They didn’t have any clue about the plans that hadn’t caught, the things Lambert had promised once Aiden got out, the cliche sort of dreams that had driven him on for half a decade. Little farmstead somewhere. Garage workshop and a bit of land. Space to shoot firearms and grow a little garden, keep chickens, foster dogs. A woodstove and a worn quilt. Somewhere something like home.

No one here even looked at Lambert longer than it took to say hello. Nobody offered him any sympathies.

_ Sorry Lambert that you can’t look at your living room with the lights out anymore, have to have every lamp blazing even at night. Sorry that you know what it feels like when a rib pops under your plunging hands. Sorry that you can still taste the sour spittle of his lips when you let yourself think on it too long. Sorry he died on you. Sorry you’re enough of an idiot not to have seen it coming. _

Lambert had scrounged up a pair of slacks and a dark button down for this. He’d showered and slicked back his wild curls and flossed his damn teeth for this. It had taken him a full hour to dredge up more than one of his old dress shoes, brandishing the single, useless leather shoe like a weapon as he grew more frantic in his search.

He’d finally found the shoe and a thin, blue tie that wasn’t too wrinkled, and he’d even worn the silver cufflinks that had been his daddy’s that had sat in a shoebox full of other useless junk for who knows how long.

Got all prettied up just to watch strangers socialize in a sterile room. Nobody even talking about Aiden. Nobody saying much of any substance at all.

And of course, just when he started shuffling toward the exits to flee from the mundane wrongness of it all, fearing that if he stayed a second longer he’d give into the urge to shout and flip tables and scatter cookie crumbs across the neat carpet, Eskel and the rest stepped through the glass doors.

The idiot was wearing a whole ass, ill-fitting tux complete with crooked, tartan bowtie, probably borrowed from his granddad because Lambert was dead sure he’d never had any occasion to wear anything as ridiculous as that. He’d parted his hair down the center and combed it back and behind his ears, looking like a teenaged boy at his first prom.

Looking just as antsy and wrong-footed too, until he caught sight of Lambert scooting his way around the outskirts of the gathering.

Trailing behind Eskel was Geralt’s girl, the mysterious and otherworldly Yennefer, who walked easy in six inch heels and a black dress that fell off one shoulder. Her arm linked around the waist of the far more plainly-dressed woman beside her, the gauzy fabric of a black blouse billowing around Yennefer’s arm. Took a moment to recognize Geralt, her silver head bowed against Yennefer’s bare shoulder to speak to her partner, heels giving Yennefer a good few inches on her. Behind them, the twins’ cousin, Coen, followed, hands shoved in his pockets.

_ Gang’s all here _ , Lambert thought stupidly, still figuring maybe if he hurried, he could make it out the exit doors before they could catch him. Before the nostalgia could punch and settle.

He hadn’t seen Geralt since last year, since before she came out, and Coen had a little family now somewhere down south, a baby on the way. Went out of their way to be here for the memorial service of a guy they’d barely known. Went out of their way for their old buddy Lambert, more like, and that made him itch like nothing else.

In some other universe, there was a casket and a bruised, gloomy sky, and all of them lined up as pallbearers beside him bearing Aiden’s body down the church stairs into a grey cemetery. 

Instead, there was whatever this was. 

A quiet gathering for a boy who’d died years ago and taken his sweet time on his last breath. 

The others held back as Eskel waved them off, diverting to the table of refreshments.

He looked different in the shitty fluorescent light, a slow smile stretching out his pink scar tissue. He looked too big and too small for his borrowed tux. He limped worse than usual on his bad knee. A little crease of worry wrinkled his brow as he loomed closer. 

Same way he’d looked at him when they parted what felt like years but had only been days ago. Driving him back to his shit apartment above the tracks. Saying  _ I’m sorry _ instead of goodbye.

“You stop out back to dig that off a dead guy before you got here, Esk?” Lambert asked, tugging on a corner of the tartan bowtie.

“Close enough,” said Eskel and reached to tuck the errant flap of Lambert’s collar. Faint warmth and pressure of his rough fingers. Simple and intimate. “How are you doin’?”

“Trying to pick me up at a funeral?” asked Lambert. 

Eskel huffed out a laugh. “Kinda lame funeral.”

“Yeah.” 

“You want me to pick you up at this funeral?” Eskel asked, easy and deep. 

A big hand cupped around the back of Lambert’s neck and held there, thumb touching the flyaway hairs behind his ear. The corners of Eskel’s lips tipped up like he couldn’t quite help it, like he was trying his damndest not to make stupid, flirty jokes at a memorial service and failing. Lambert wished he’d make more stupid, flirty jokes and wished he’d keep looking at him like that too.

Same way he had that night picking him up from the hospital. That old, steady fondness. The familiar crease of worry, the way he slipped into easy banter and insults knowing that Lambert didn’t have the stomach for anything resembling tenderness. Good old Eskel. 

_ Shit. _ He was halfway in love with him. 

Or he wanted to be. Wanted to go back a few nights and drag Eskel up out of the water and into him instead of pushing down and away. Wanted to do something reckless, something loud, something that shook up and alarmed this sleepy nothing of a funeral. He wanted to scream until his lungs ran out of sound. Run flat-out, set something on fire, leap from a railroad bridge, kiss Eskel right now on the red bow of his lips. 

Aiden would have wanted something like that for his last rites. Something with explosions. Something that rattled this podunk town to its bones. Something that outraged and titillated. He would have wanted something larger than life and a little bit risque and something no one would ever dare forget.

But Aiden was dead. 

Had been dead less than a week or had been dead for years.

He’d already been corpse-eyed when Lambert picked him up last Friday, sallow-skinned and buzzed near-bald. He hadn’t wanted to do anything but sleep and play some video games and eat a lot of takeout, and all Lambert had wanted to do was scream, pressure building for five whole years to this moment of release that fizzed out into something withdrawn and thin and quiet.

Aiden had barely looked at him, even while they laughed together, even while they kissed deep and urgent in the fuzzy glow of the television. Lambert had prodded and teased and held on tight until they both bruised, wanting to shake him until the past five years sloughed away. Whittle him back to sixteen, to the boy he was that handful of months they’d loved each other, all of it shrinking down and periscoping into the sort of memories veiled in rose-colored fog.

Aiden was dead.

"Wanna get out of here?" Lambert asked, gravel-voiced and choking.

"Yeah. The others are going into town after this. Go to some bars," said Eskel. "You wanna…"

He trailed off as Lambert echoed the grasp of the hand at the back of his neck. Fingers curling into short tufts of hair and hanging on tight. Eskel bent easy under the scant pressure, letting Lambert move him. He stopped just short of leaning their foreheads together, shared warm breath tickling goosebumps in the stale chill of the church. 

"No," said Lambert, swallowing. “Just you.”

Feeling stupid, reckless, nothing to lose, he brushed his mouth to Eskel’s and let them breathe through the kiss together in front of the whole sorry crowd of funeralgoers. Audience be damned.

“Shit,” breathed Eskel against his open mouth.

“Yeah,” said Lambert. “Shit.” 

And kissed him again.


	14. can't starve us out, can't make us run

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warning** for a funeral service and some smooching, referenced child abuse
> 
> chapter title is from country folks can survive by hank williams jr because i am being ridiculous with this story i suppose

In the bisque-white fellowship room with its folding tables and chairs and limp, plastic tablecloths, Eskel found a man he didn’t recognize, all dolled up in rumpled clothes and a crooked tie, bruised and worn-thin and wild hair slicked against his skull. He’d worn some kinda heavy cologne, the nasty shit that plagued locker rooms everywhere, and when Eskel reached to clasp the back of his neck, he swayed into it.

Knew he was well and truly fucked by the loose dangle of his limbs but could see that slow rage ticking up in his expression when his eyes swept the subdued crowd. It looked like a family event more than a funeral, mostly women and children, the lot of them long settled into the life Aiden had lost. 

Needed to get Lambert out of here before he snapped.

Eskel didn’t know what he’d been expecting, had almost bailed and not shown at all. Geralt and Yen hadn’t let him bow out. He’d thought Lambert would freeze up, go sour, or pretend the few days staying at his trailer never happened.

Instead, he smiled when he caught sight of him, a tired and fond thing. 

He’d spent the past few days wishing somebody else had picked Lambert up from that hospital parking lot. Somebody with better sense. Somebody who wasn’t a deadbeat drunk who socialized mostly with sheep.

But there hadn’t been anybody else. Just him. 

As Lambert tugged him closer, a guilty shiver of his own good fortune struck him.  _ Just me. No one but me. _

Eskel’s thumbnail caught the hiccup of Lambert’s pulse as they kissed in the exposed space of the fellowship room. 

Didn’t feel as blasphemous as it should have. Any God up there would have prevented the lot of this or else was still plotting some grand scheme that neither of them gave a shit about.

Didn’t think it made much of a difference. The dearly departed could be up there doing wheelies and jello shots or in some dank, dark pit or just up and gone, and Eskel’d still be here getting kissed in a church with Lambert’s hands smoothing down the front of his ill-fitting dress shirt. 

Vesemir’s old tux was a good match through the shoulders but too tight through the chest and belly, and Lambert’s fingers snuck absent-minded through the gaps between the straining buttons to touch the cotton softness of his undershirt. Just quietly tactile like he’d always been, like the other night drunk with his knuckles tickling the hem of Eskel’s jean shorts, like a hundred other impulsive touches that had never meant  _ this _ or maybe always had.

Lambert reaching. Seeking. Requesting something. Barely even knowing he was doing it and not having the language for it but asking anyway, and fuck, Eskel wanted to give to whatever he wanted. Hollow his whole too-big body around his old buddy and offer whatever comfort he was able, whatever could be dredged out of him. 

The rest of the world sure wasn’t going to goddamn do it. Never had offered Lambert a shred of comfort, even as a scrawny little kid showing up to the farm with bruises ringed on his scrawny wrists.  _ No one but me. _

“Shit,” Eskel whispered.

“Shit,” said Lambert, nothing like a curse.

In the wavering heat of the church parking lot, the old crew made to part ways. They’d planned for this, Eskel not sure what sorry state he’d find Lambert in when they pulled up to the memorial service but knowing he’d be rattling out of his skin, either ready to leap into the first dive bar he knocked into and get sloshed or to do something even more reckless with or without them.

Hadn’t quite expected the reckless thing Lambert wanted to do was Eskel himself, but he wasn’t quick to complain about it, not even when his sister arched an eyebrow over the way Lambert had an arm shoved inside his blazer to tuck around the girth of his waist, leaning in like he was swaying out of a club and not a memorial service. 

She didn’t say a word, thank fuck, just clapped a hand on Lambert’s arm as Yen offered her quiet condolences and Coen tipped his hat, and then they all rumbled off together in Geralt’s truck, her pride flags flapping wildly. 

Eskel hadn’t yet dropped the steady hand that cupped the back of Lambert’s neck, and while his sister’s tailpipe belched black smoke, Lambert pressed his palm flat against the back of Eskel’s dress shirt, blazer already slung off into the bed of the truck, and wiggled a finger through one of his belt loops.

“You got a change of clothes?” he asked, close enough for breath to tickle his starched collar. 

“Yeah,” said Eskel. “For you, too.”

“Let’s go,” he said and ducked out of Eskel’s hold to clamber into the passenger seat. Waited until Eskel had climbed in after him to hold his face in both hands and kiss him stupid. Felt a little like Lambert could wrench his jaw and snap him dead. He’d let him, goddamn it. 

“We doin’ this here?” he rumbled in a voice amused and breathless, unable to do anything but let Lambert lead them. He had to twist around in his seat to let the other man drag him into an embrace, half kneeling on the gearshift and just clinging.

“In a church fucking parking lot?” teased Lambert, but he was the one kissing under the hinge of his jaw in small, wet pecks.

“In a church fucking parking lot.”

“No, idiot,” said Lambert, settling back in his seat. He kept an arm slung over Eskel’s shoulders, thumb stuck in the hollow behind his jaw where he’d just been kissing. “We’re gonna light some shit on fire. Or something.”

“Is that some kinda metaphor for how you think I am in bed? Because sorry to disappoint but I’m not--”

“He deserved better,” said Lambert with a fierceness that didn’t surprise Eskel at all. “He deserved fucking better.”

“Yeah,” said Eskel, and reality knocked back into him like a cold dunk in a mountain stream.

Hell, it had never been  _ just him _ , even for all his guilty possessiveness. 

Had never really been him at all. It had been Aiden. 

Not even now. They were at Aiden’s fucking funeral for fuck’s sake, and Eskel had had the shit-fucking idiot gall to think--

Lambert’s thumb stroked where it rested on his neck, brushing the round of his earlobe. It tickled mostly, and he fought the urge to cringe away and laugh. Didn’t want to spook Lambert into dropping his hand. 

It didn’t matter, Eskel realized, who Lambert wished was here instead. That aching desperation reared up again, that desire to keep his friend in one piece, hold the fissuring parts of him together however he was able. He’d fucked up once and wouldn’t do it again. Didn’t matter that it was stupid. Didn’t matter who else could have been here instead. No one else was here. Eskel was here. No one but him.

Lambert didn’t seem to notice his minor crisis, launching into half-baked and ridiculous plans.

"You got any fireworks?"

"No."

"You wanna jump off a bridge?"

"Not so much. I'm a fatass. I'd sink."

"Then, let's have sex."

Eskel snorted.

"Gee, way to make a guy feel special. Third best option?"

"Sorry, Esk, I just need-- that funeral sucked ass."

"Yeah," said Eskel. He got it. Somehow. Even though it was all fucking nutty."You wanna-- what? Give em hell?" 

"He deserved something bigger. Better. Louder."

"And what would he think about option number three? Ain't the classiest reason for a hookup. And weren’t you two-- you know."

"Aiden's dead," said Lambert, gripping him by the shoulders. "And it's not just--" He twisted to kiss him again, breathing deep through his nose.

"Not just what?"

"Think I've had a big fat crush on you for mostly forever,” said Lambert, all quiet, so close Eskel couldn’t quite focus on his face. “Since we were kids."

"Aw, that's real cute, Lamb,” drawled Eskel, ignoring the cliche way that his heart rate flip-flopped. The cab of the truck had barely had time to go stuffy in the summer heat, but it ticked up now until he felt like smothering. Didn’t quite know how to get the  _ I think so too _ to come out in words. Had never talked about this kinda stuff, especially not with Lambert. 

Instead of saying anything stupid, he snugged his arms around Lambert and held on, sharing breath, and shuffled up to kiss him on his big, wrinkly forehead in a way that couldn’t really be misconstrued as horny fumbling.

_ It’s not just you, _ he wanted to say and didn’t.  _ Thank fuck, it’s not just me. _

"Adorable,” said Lambert, in a voice that cracked high a little. 

“Shut up.”

Thankfully, rather than push it, Lambert launched back into planning. 

“Come on, work with me here, Esk. You know that old spillway? Just out of town."

"Yeah. You gonna blow up a dam, Lambert?"

"No, no, just vandalize it."

"Sure thing, weirdo."

_ Anything.  _

Somehow Eskel would do anything. Would give it all he got.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter: butthole prose


	15. stayin' the whole night through

The spillway loomed smaller than in his memory, a little slick of water down a concrete slope from one level of the brown river to the other. The river itself shrank down to a creekbed. Drought had gone on for weeks now, but it wasn’t just that. Lambert hadn’t been out here since he lost Aiden.

And that was the long and short of it. The same truth those funeralgoers knew.

Wasn’t a week ago he’d lost Aiden. It was years.

Eskel’s truck rocked over the dry ruts that led down to the water, and Lambert was out before he’d fully parked and scurrying down the grassy bank that ended in a plunge of concrete abutment looking out over the spillway.

They’d stopped off at a local hardware store for spray paint and probably terrified the little old lady manning the register half to death the way they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Eskel’s bulk backed up against shelves full of neatly-packaged hardware bits, Lambert’s hands shoved into the back pockets of his jeans, threatening to rain little plastic baggies of nuts and washers and screws down on their heads.

“Talk about a screw loose, Lambo,” Eskel had said, deep voice rumbling through his chest in a way Lambert felt as much as heard. 

“You hear the one about the robot one night stand?” asked Lambert, feeling the hot pulse in Eskel’s throat against the tip of his nose. “Yeah, he nuts and then bolts.”

Lambert brandished the bottle now, rocking it wildly in a clenched fist as he clambered onto the abutment.

“Whoa there,” said Eskel, “you get paint on my truck, and you’re a dead man. Or you could just fall in and be a dead man.”

“Not a far enough drop to kill me. Maybe bust myself up a bit.”

“Well, no busting please.”

“Gee, Esk, that’s mighty presumptive of you,” he drawled with a suggestive waggle of his eyebrows.

“Shut it and make your pretty picture. What are you planning here anyway?”

Lambert leaned over, and Eskel caught him around the waist, big hand fitting easy into the groove of his hip. Half made him want to fling himself off the abutment to see if those big hands would catch him.

He peered down at a scuff of faded paint on the rough slab of the wall and could see Aiden, bright-eyed and sun-freckled, dangling there to scrawl it, feel the tug of his weight against his arms.

“This was Aiden’s fishing spot,” he said. “Guess he used to go here with his dad back when he was still around.”

“Mmmm,” hummed Eskel, the palm cupped around his hip holding steady, his lips brushing the hem of the back of his shirt. Lambert’s muscles itched to jump.

“Always fucking hated fishing.”

Eskel chuckled, stirring the fine hair at the base of his neck. 

“What was that about the other night then?”

The swaying boughs of the willows over the cool water. Eskel’s body pushed down into the creek, all fish-belly white except for the bronzed collar of his neck and arms.

Lambert twisted to kiss him deep and full on the mouth, trying without words to say whatever he’d been too chicken-shit scared of the other night. Still full body scared of it, like he’d jitter his bones out of their sockets.

But he knew, his heels skirting the lip of the abutment, that if he fell or leapt, Eskel would try his damndest to snag him like a hooked fish and reel him back in. Like he’d been doing for Aiden for years, holding on and on, digging in his heels while his friend’s body swung out over the brown water. 

“I think--” said Lambert. “Sounds shitty maybe, but I think he’s been dead for years. The Aiden I knew. He died at seventeen.”

“Doesn’t sound shitty,” Eskel said, his voice the same low cadence he’d use to soothe a panicky heifer. “Think I know somethin’ about that.”

“You’re not dead, idiot.” Lambert gripped his biceps and leaned their foreheads together, Eskel’s fringe tickling his nose. “You’re right here with me.”

“Yeah,” said Eskel. “Always, buddy. Always will be.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, because I give a shit about you.”

“Oof, that’s real romantic, Esk.”

“Damn, tough crowd. I’ll bring you a dozen roses next time, princess.”

Lambert kissed him, sweet and careful.

“I give a shit about you too.”

When he abruptly shifted to drop his weight off the abutment, Eskel swore and gripped his taut arms tight while Lambert planted his feet on the wall and graffitied Aiden’s name in messy, hot pink block letters. 

He knew that too would fade someday.

Eskel held on tight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter's short but  
> next time: cows  
> and will likely be the last chapter, kids


	16. where the heart is

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warning** for a sudden explicit and awkward sex scene in this chapter
> 
> chapter title a reference to [where the heart is by brett eldredge](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0pTrPfiwgE)

The summer afternoon lay heavy with muggy air as the sun baked in wavering ripples over the rambling land of Morhen farms. The maple and beech windbreak swayed along the ridge behind the worn farmhouse, and the willows rustled above the cool banks of the creek. In their neatly-divided kennels, speckled dogs snoozed in warm piles, their noses twitching, and in the dusty back corner of the empty garage, lambs bounced through fresh-laid hay while their mothers lounged to chew their cud.

On the crooked front porch of Eskel’s trailer, Geralt and Yennefer laid down cards on a wobbly folding table, instructing Coen on the finer details of the obscure and horribly nerdy card game that they were so taken with, cackling as Coen crossed his eyes and swore, complaining that he was simply too much of a dumb hick for this shit. The ostentatious truck sat squarely in the drive, twin flags catching a swelling breeze as the line of the horizon darkened into a smear of bruising.

From the depths of a brown river, somewhere beyond the farm, the warped eyes of blunt-headed carp gazed up at fresh, pink marks on a rough concrete wall above the trickle of a spillway. The cicadas nestled in the crooks of the trees swelled a repeating note as tumbled clouds crept along the blue expanse of the sky. The crickets perched on cinderblocks and tucked in patches of clover and hollows of rotting logs creaked an echoing song. 

The cows that stood belly deep in the rustling pasture grass flicked their ears against the touch of flies and strode with slow purpose into the shelter of the trees, their hides twitching as they folded their legs and settled. 

Their dull eyes blinked in animal simplicity at the dust cloud still fading from the tires of a truck settled at the pasture gate. The men that rose together from cab of the truck bore no buckets that promised corn or pellet feed, and so the herd did not bother to approach the fence, watching blankly as the men moved to a soft swale of ground bare of grass and lay down together.

A poor place to lie, thought the cows bedded down under the willows, especially with the pressure in the air bottoming out and tickling their fly-bitten skin. 

The swell of the approaching storm.

* * *

"What's that taste like, huh?" Lambert teased, drawl muffled in his folded arms. Eskel licked the sweat beading up on the dent of his tailbone, and Lambert shuddered away with an in-drawn breath.

"Ass," said Eskel and licked a swipe around the pucker clenching his finger, giving to the push of damp knuckles. Tasted like skin, ridges up against the flat of his tongue that softened into a pink furl, silky hot on the inside where his callouses swiped. 

It should have felt strange, this intimacy, Lambert’s shorts and briefs shucked down his freckled thighs and cheeks bare. Probably would have with anyone else. 

There had been kissing, deep and heated and slow, barely pausing as they fumbled through the pasture hanging on to one another. The bare hollow of ground cupped their bodies and hid them from sight, and Lambert whined and rutted against him until Eskel jerked him around to lie flat on his belly and pressed a palm down on his low back and tugged him bare in a breath.

It should have felt clumsy. Awkward.

"You really trust my hygiene that much?"

"No," he said.

Nobody expected an asshole to taste good, look pretty. That's not why anybody licked an asshole. Or not why Eskel did it. Was doing it. 

He didn't make a habit of it. Licking assholes. Never done it before.

But something made him want to taste Lambert there and everywhere. Lambert had untamed ginger hair all through his crevices, down his thighs and even into the dimples of his buttcheeks, and Eskel pulled stray hairs absent-minded from his mouth. He opened his lips over the wrinkled softness of his balls. Crooked his nose against the erect base of his dick and his pointy pelvic bone and breathed deep.

It was Lambert. All of it good because it was him.

Something intimate about the hitches of breath and mumbled insults. 

A familiar sort of clumsiness.

"Weirdo," mumbled Lambert, but his breath hitched. He kept clenching down taut every time Eskel got a little bit of leeway with his probing finger, spit their only lube, so he did nothing with his finger but wiggle it, pulsing and barely crooking. 

It was enough, somehow, Lambert losing his composure one press of Eskel’s finger at a time, his hands splayed in the packed dirt, his exhaled breath whining.

“You’re noisy,” said Eskel and kissed the groove of Lambert’s spine, gripping the small globe of his cheek in one hand to drag a thumb beside his crooked finger. A new noise, a groan that dipped high on the tail end when he kissed low around the pucker that clenched his knuckle. 

“Shut it,” breathed Lambert, twisting his head to look back at Eskel. A pink flush touched his cheeks and nose. A warm breeze tousled his red curls. “Quit looking at me like that, idiot.”

“Not looking at you like anything,” said Eskel.

“Sure you’re not. You’re all smug.”

“Don’t know what you mean,” said Eskel smugly as the steady curl and flex of his finger inspired a full body shudder.

“Asshole,” Lambert breathed. 

“Good going, Lambo, you know your anatomy.”

“Come on, Eskel, I’m--”

A sudden rumble of thunder overhead interrupted him, the pasture grass swept to tickle their bodies as the wind kicked up around them. The pair had only a startled breath between the echoing clap and the first heavy raindrops struck. The droplets smacked into the bare ground around their bodies, rising little plumes of dust, and Eskel swore as he withdrew while Lambert wiggled back into his shorts.

And then, they were up and running, the raindrops driven by the rising wind into needling points. Lambert dragged Eskel by the stretched out collar of his shirt, other hand fisted in his drooping shorts, and together, they made for the treeline, the sky opening up all at once into a steady deluge.

When they hit the willows along the creek, they found the shadowed space already occupied by the mounded black shapes of the herd. Lambert was shaking in his arms, drenched all down the back of his borrowed shirt and hair dripping wet, and it took Eskel a concerned beat to realize he was laughing.

“Come on, Esk,” said Lambert, laughing, kissing him, tugging him back against the rough bark of a willow. Their feet tangled up in its gnarled roots, and Eskel braced his elbows around Lambert’s body. 

“I can’t,” said Eskel, feeling the solid heat of Lambert’s erection against his belly. He met the blank stare of a cow chewing her cud, looking down her nose at him. “They’re watching.”

“They’re-- the fucking cows?” 

And he began to laugh harder, tucking his head down into the crook of Eskel’s shoulder, raindrops tickling down through the canopy of the willows as the thunder rumbled again and again over the pasture. The breeze smelled good and fresh, and Lambert felt good in his arms.

Eskel shrugged his body closer, enveloping as much of his friend as he could.

He held on tight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's it, friends! 
> 
> you're welcome for cow pov <3
> 
> thank you to the few folks who have been reading this silly self-indulgent story. i know the ending is open but i like to think these two idiots will figure it out.
> 
> please do not ask how many times i listened to fishing in the dark for this fic. 
> 
> don't you just hate it when you accidentally fall in love with a particular version of a rarepair that only exists in your particular obscure and niche AU? haha fuck
> 
> find me on tumblr @limerental


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